I’ve heard that it is paved in good intentions. I’m not a believer in that particular bit of dystopic myth, but I do know about good intentions that go unfulfilled. Just yesterday, when I posted The Week in COVID, I noted that I needed to look at the CDC web site to see whether that site reports wastewater COVID RNA levels. I finished that post, had dinner, and sat down to watch Guardians of the Galaxy Part 3. So much for good intentions.
This morning, I got an email from my retired physician buddy AD Smith asking me to forward whatever I had found on the CDC website regarding the aforementioned wastewater viral levels. Merde!
This afternoon, after brunch, I sat down to look at the CDC website. There is a lot of material there. An entire section of the site is devoted to wastewater surveillance. There are also useful maps that report wastewater virus trends by site. One can also download various data sets for offline manipulation. I did that with wastewater data, focused on data for Travis County, and then graphed the viral loads as a percentage of the highest value reported in the data set. The data looks like this. You can see a very slight uptick in viral load in July 2023, but we are still at 13% of the highest level we saw in 2022.
None of this adds anything of value to the COVID discussion; I think that our local health authorities have that well in hand, but being able to find the raw data and then manipulate it is definitely satisfying to those of us who are data nerds.