Middlesex MA Wastewater Tracking (18-Dec-2023 data)

Not that it wasn't already apparent but covid spread is definitely on the rise in MA, and in particular in Middlesex country. The latest update from BioBot is that Middlesex had 1,636 copies per mL (roughly equivalent to 218 cases per day per 100,000 people, where 8 cases per day per 100,000 people was the original highest threshold, which was later relaxed to 16 to make doing nothing seem more reasonable). Nationwide spread hasn't been at 1,636 since the start of 2022 (no, not since last winter's wave, since the winter wave before that) Admittedly, MA saw that rate at its crest in the winter of 2022-2023 but limited to Dec 23-Jan 8.

https://biobotstg.wpengine.com/data/covid-19#county-25017

May be an image of text that says 'Middlesex County, MA Wastewater: 2,000 Effective SARS- powered CoV-2virus concentration (copies of sewage) Biobot Analytics 500, COPY LINK ,000 500 Sep '23 Oct'23 '23 Nov Dec'

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MA Wastewater Tracking (23-Jan-2024 data)

Image
See that little uptick at the end of each graph? This didn't happen in 2022 but did in 2023. We understood the goal in 2022 (to some degree) but since ... is there some portion of the population who says "covid spread must be down so let's go nuts"? I suspect this is partially colleges reconvening their students on campuses where in 2022 they were still trying to get their students to maintain some precautions and they haven't been since... but I also don't think this is just college campuses.
Read more

Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 02-Nov-2020 Edition - NEW LAYOUT IN THE REPORT!

THERE'S A NEW REPORT LAYOUT! (there will be a separate post about current counts/prediction follow up) It's always interesting to see a new layout because it gives insight into what the state's priorities and story-telling is.  Today's layout shows that they continue to be either sloppy with their design OR they want to try to confuse people by putting deaths and turn-around time for test results under the same heading line, similar to how all testing/cases are under one and how all information on hospitalizations are under a second line. We now have an "average age of deaths"... but we don't have which average it is, whether it's mean, median, mode, or whether it's overall or for the newly reported or the last 7 days or last 14 days or any kind of detail around it.... same with the new "average age of cases that were hospitalized". They're no longer showing the percent of individuals tested testing positive and only showing the perce...
Read more

Switching to Wastewater Monitoring Only

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 ...
Read more