The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses more restrained language to explain: high level of covid-19 activityInfected people are much less likely to become seriously ill.
like everything related to In coronavirus data, all indicators have asterisks and important warnings. And surges are especially difficult to compare. Here’s some guidance from experts on how best to interpret your data.
What we can learn from wastewater data
Health officials are looking not just at clinics and testing sites, but also into sewers, to understand how the coronavirus is circulating in communities. This allows us to capture asymptomatic, mildly ill patients who are usually kept out of public health interest.
Taken at face value, wastewater tracking suggests the virus is occurring at its highest level since the big wave of Omicron infections in winter 2021-2022, the first spike due to widespread wastewater monitoring. Although it looks like it is, it is nowhere near the height of Omicron. .
CDC survey of national monitoring sites reveals coronavirus levels in wastewater It has exceeded the peak of last winter.although it is an agency. Officials monitoring the data said the levels were comparable. Other agencies that track wastewater: biobot analysis and Wastewater SCANis also at a slightly higher level than a year ago.
But experts caution against asserting that we are in the second-highest surge based on sewer monitoring.
“We’re clearly detecting the amount of copies of the virus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it directly corresponds to the number of people infected,” said Dr. says John Brownstein, who has studied the method. Survey to estimate the spread of coronavirus in the community. “The only thing we need to be careful about is extrapolating these results to numbers that can cause fear and anxiety.”
Changes in wastewater data are also influenced by the number of treatment facilities participating in monitoring and the methods used to monitor samples.Other factors that can affect the amount of virus people shed Those factors include immunity levels and infecting variants, but wastewater trackers say it’s unclear whether these factors explain the increase in coronavirus in wastewater over the past year. .
“The numbers are high, but are they meaningfully high?” said Amy Kirby, who oversees wastewater surveillance at the CDC. “It tells us there are more cases in those communities, but we don’t know if it will have any impact. Our hospitals are not necessarily under more stress than they were last year. I don’t feel it.”
What we can learn from hospital data
Kirby’s comments demonstrate how the CDC and other health officials are fixated on hospital strain as a measure of the severity of the pandemic.
Since the public health emergency ended in May, hospitals are no longer required to report suspected cases of COVID-19. But they have until the end of April to report laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19, a metric the CDC uses to track hospitalized patients over time.
By this measure, nearly 35,000 Americans were newly hospitalized with COVID-19 during the week of December 30th. Weekly hospitalizations peaked last winter and stood at 44,000 this time last year.
Hospitals are no longer testing everyone for coronavirus, which may explain some of the decline. However, people who are hospitalized with respiratory illnesses are usually tested. CDC officials, the American Hospital Association and other experts say the changes make the actual data more accurate.
“If a hospital reports that someone has coronavirus, the reason for hospitalization is likely to be coronavirus, as such extensive screening of all patients is no longer done. ” said Theo Bos, professor emeritus at the university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. University of Washington.
Wastewater data also provides useful planning signals for hospitals when they need to prepare for increased staffing or additional beds during an already busy period.
Kirby said there are signs the coronavirus is peaking in wastewater, but the coming weeks will tell whether hospitals need to worry about a prolonged season.
“This likely tells us that there are many mild cases of COVID-19 in the community, including asymptomatic cases, and vaccination rates are high. “But it doesn’t cause very serious infections,” Kirby said. About wastewater trends.
For the average person, does it really matter whether this year’s national coronavirus surge is higher? Some experts don’t think so.
As always during the pandemic winter, the odds of contracting the virus are now higher. If you have a low risk tolerance, or if you or the people you spend time with are at risk of getting seriously ill, now is a good time to take precautions.
Rather than examining wastewater to understand how widespread the coronavirus is, experts advise using wastewater to understand how the virus is trending.
“You can also look at it as a weather forecast. Some people look at the weather and say, ‘Oh, it’s raining today, so let’s work from home.’ They don’t care about other people and go running in the rain,” said Alexandria Boehm, a professor of engineering at Stanford University and program director of WastewaterSCAN. “You’re getting the information. You choose what you do with it.”
Throughout the pandemic, the primary goal of virus restrictions has been not to eradicate infections, but to protect health systems from becoming overwhelmed. In the early months of the pandemic, measures to “flatten the curve” by closing businesses and keeping people at home were aimed at preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed by a surge of critically ill patients with unknown pathogens. Ta.
Doctors now know how to treat covid-19 and patients can be discharged from the hospital faster. “Not all hospitalizations are the same,” says Jeffrey Sherman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University.
Weekly number of new coronavirus deathsThe average number of patients from Thanksgiving to Christmas was 1,500, a slight increase since hospitalizations began rising in early November. These deaths are less than half the number of deaths a year ago. The death toll for December is likely to rise as new data is examined. But Sherman said the evidence so far suggests patients hospitalized with coronavirus are less likely to die than they were last winter.
Unless they warn that hospitals are on the verge of collapse, it is highly unlikely that government officials will reinstate measures such as mask mandates and vaccination requirements for entry to public facilities. Some critics of this public health approach argue that it ignores other effects of widespread infection, such as long-term COVID-19 infections.
“It doesn’t necessarily show up in the 30-day hospitalization statistics,” says Michael Holger, an assistant professor of psychology at Tulane University whose unofficial wastewater forecasts reach a large audience on social media. “I really hope that the CDC speaks clearly about these issues and recommends mask-wearing, remote working, vaccinations, and connects confirmed infections to actionable actions.”
COVID-19 affects more than just hospitalization. It can make people feel terrible, disrupt their plans, and force them to stay home or skip school.
For most Americans, there is little chance of getting seriously ill or developing long-term complications, especially if you are vaccinated. But when we look at the toll of the virus on society, the pandemic has taught us again and again that a small portion of a huge number is still a large number.
Even though the chances of a healthy person developing long-term COVID-19 infection are low and have continued to decline since the pandemic began, a surge in millions of people would still affect thousands of Americans. Humans may become infected.
and Even if death rates are lower among vaccinated people, the most vulnerable have a harder time avoiding the virus There will be a surge and thousands of people will die.