Fun with COVID-19 reporting in MA (and elsewhere)

The tracking suggests that mid-May have been the low for this trough in spread but only time will tell. What we do know is that we've doubled the spread in the southern region and increased by 10% in the northern region. If that was our low, we didn't reach our low from March 2022 and our low was still roughly 10 times higher than we had reached in mid-Jun 2021. Assuming 125-150 copies/mL equates to the entry to high-risk of 16 cases per 100k people per day, we got as low as 129 and 156 in the southern and northern regions respectively so neither region got out of the high-risk zone. This time in 2022, we were just starting to reduce spread from a wave in May and that reduction would continue through June before we would start to see spread climb again. Will we skip the June reduction this time around? The pandemic isn't over. Keep taking precautions. Keep protecting your friends, neighbors, and loved ones from you potentially spreading to them without knowing you'

Wastewater tracking of COVID-19 in MA shows the southern region's 7-day average at 129 copies per mL and northern region at 156. If we assume 125-150 is roughly the equivalent of 16 cases per 100k people per day (the threshold for concern after those thresholds were relaxed a bit... 8 cases per 100k being the original threshold), while we're lower than we've been since April 2022... we're still at a concerning spread lead, still higher than we were in early March 2022 and still roughly 10 times as high as we were in mid-Jun 2021. The pandemic isn't over. Keep taking precautions. Keep protecting your friends, neighbors, and loved ones from you potentially spreading to them without knowing you're infected. And if you're not concerned about being one of those that are hospitalized or dead, think about the potential lifelong detriments to your health and capabilities that can come with Long Covid regardless of how severe your COVID-19 symptoms.

Case counts were already somewhat misleading so, if people were actually paying attention to the wastewater and had a target and/or threshold for concern, that would actually be potentially a more reasonable thing to monitor... with that in mind, let's look at some time points to try to find some measures to consider.  Let's start with establishing a few thresholds.   Early on in the pandemic, we said 8 cases per 100,000 people per day was the highest threshold of concern (ie, that was the introduction to the highest risk-rating we had).  Later, we relaxed this a bit because we realized that this would keep us on high alert and never allow us to go back to normal ... sort of like saying that everybody is smoking so the threshold that for risking cancer shouldn't be smoking 3 cigarettes a day but instead should be a pack a day.  Based on this relaxing of concern, let's go ahead and add in 16 cases per 100,000 people per day as a threshold to monitor for, just as we did w