For my recent wastewater data story, I’ve been looking at a lot of wastewater surveillance dashboards from different health agencies and research groups. One of my favorites is from Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN), a project based out of Stanford University.
Read MoreData sources and updates for the week of April 24 include COVID-19 on airplanes, death rates by race and ethnicity, Long COVID research, and more.
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This week, the CDC introduced a new team focused on modeling infectious diseases, called the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (or CFA). The agency aims to hire about 100 scientists and communicators for the center; they’ll currently focus on COVID-19, but will expand to other diseases in the future.
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This week, I had a new story published with FiveThirtyEight and the Documenting COVID-19 project about the data and implementation challenges of wastewater surveillance. As bonus material in today’s COVID-19 Data Dispatch, I wanted to share one of the interviews I did for the story, which provides a good case study of the benefits and challenges of COVID-19 surveillance in wastewater.
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After weeks of me warning about it, a BA.2 surge is upon us. Nationwide, new COVID-19 cases have gone up for the third week in a row; we’ve seen a 68% increase since the last week of March.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of April 17 include two reports on wastewater surveillance, SARS-CoV-2 in animals, COVID-19 impacts by income, and more.
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As though it’s not already confusing enough to distinguish between Omicron BA.1 and BA.2, more sublineages have popped up in recent weeks as Omicron continues to spread and mutate. Here are two that I’m watching, though they don’t seem to be major causes for concern at this time.
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Remember how, in December, the CDC changed its recommendations for people who’d tested positive for COVID-19 to isolating for only five days instead of ten? And a bunch of experts were like, “Wait a second, I’m not sure if that’s sound science?” Well, studies since this guidance was changed have shown that, actually, a lot of people with COVID-19 are still contagious after five days. Yet the CDC has not revised its guidance at all.
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New COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have gone up for the second week in a row, and the increase was sharper this week. While the daily average of new cases (about 31,000) remains low compared to the Omicron surge, this trend is still concerning—especially when factoring in all the at-home rapid tests that are going unreported right now.
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After the CDC released its National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) dashboard in February, the agency faced some criticism. The CDC has responded with some helpful upgrades to its dashboard, though there’s still room for improvement.
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