Current Wastewater Data
Is Mirroring Covid Case Counts as During First Omicron Wave

Why It Matters:

“Although Spring and early Summer hospitalization rates have fallen, the virus still poses dangers, especially to the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.

"Case counts have become less reliable for predicting how much COVID is spreading in different communities & when vulnerable individuals need more protection. Even if people who are infected with the coronavirus never seek testing or treatment, they shed the virus in their stool. That has made wastewater surveillance a useful way to keep track of how much virus is circulating in a community. At the height of the pandemic, wastewater data provided an early warning of coming surges and helped experts monitor the spread of new variants.

“Now that the emergency phase of the pandemic has ended, wastewater surveillance is an even more crucial tool, experts say. This spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped calculating community Covid levels and collecting some other types of tracking data.

“For the new 2023 study, the researchers analyzed the publicly available wastewater data for 268 counties participating in the national surveillance system. They compared the wastewater trends in each county to the local case and hospitalization rates during the first three quarters of 2022.

“From January to March, a period that overlapped with the winter Omicron wave, high levels of virus in the wastewater closely mirrored high case and hospitalization rates, the scientists found. Both years, the wastewater levels were lower during the April-to-June time frame, before rising again in the July-to-September period.

What We Don’t Know: Viral evolution is a wild card.

“The coronavirus is constantly evolving. “We are assuming that inherently the virus hasn’t changed dramatically in the way that it sheds and in the way that it behaves in the environment,” said Dr. Shuchi Anand, a nephrologist at Stanford and an author of the study. But there may be future variants that show up in sewage either more or less readily than past variants have.”

The New York Times

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According to new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
"U.S. sees biggest rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations since December 2022.


‘"Early indicators of COVID-19 activity (emergency department visits; test positivity & wastewater levels) have preceded an increase in hospitalizations which is now being seen,' CDC spokesperson Kathleen Conley said in a statement.

"Since the end of June, all four indicators of an increase in a spread of the virus in the USA have been steadily rising.”

CBS News