COVID source shout-out: Body Politic
Body Politic, a health justice organization that has led Long COVID organizing over the last three years, shut down its Slack support group this week.
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COVID source shout-out: Virginia’s new wastewater dashboard
This past week, Virginia’s health department added a new wastewater surveillance section to its COVID-19 dashboard. The new section includes a map of testing sites, coronavirus trends by site, viral loads over time, and plenty of text explaining how to interpret the data.
Read MoreCOVID source shout-out: Wastewater testing at the San Francisco airport
A few months ago, I wrote about how testing sewage from airplanes could be a valuable way to keep tabs on the coronavirus variants circulating around the world. This spring, San Francisco International Airport became the first in the U.S. to actually start doing this tracking; I covered their new initiative for Science News.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: Outbreak at a CDC conference
Last week, we learned that a CDC conference led to some COVID-19 cases. Well, this past Tuesday, the Post published a follow-up story: more than 30 people got sick following the conference, and the CDC is working with the Georgia Department of Health to investigate.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: Spread at a CDC conference
This past week, the CDC hosted a conference of about 2,000 people in the agency’s epidemic intelligence service. And at least a few of the conference’s attendees tested positive for COVID-19 afterward.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: Montana ends its dashboard
Last week, I wrote about the Iowa health department’s move to end COVID-19 case reporting requirements for labs, and in turn stop reporting these data to the CDC. Well, Montana just became the next state to follow this trend.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: Iowa ends COVID-19 case reporting
As of April 1, Iowa’s state health department is no longer requiring public health laboratories to report positive COVID-19 test results—and no longer reporting statewide data to the CDC. This decision, announced in late February, is part of a growing trend away from relying on case data as people use at-home tests instead of PCR tests.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: GISAID in danger of losing trust
GISAID, the global database of virus sequences, has faced a lot of criticism recently from the virologists and bioinformaticians who rely on it—potentially hindering responses to future virus outbreaks.
Read MoreCOVID source shout-out: WastewaterSCAN’s newsletter
A few weeks ago, I learned that the WastewaterSCAN project has a newsletter, which shares updates about COVID-19 and other diseases nationally and for the Bay Area in California. It’s a helpful resource for following infectious disease trends.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: CDC ends its data newsletter
This past Friday, the CDC’s COVID-19 data team announced that its newsletter, the COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review, will send its final issue on Friday, May 12. That’s the day after the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ends.
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