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Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of July 11

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Tags: ask.survey, recurring.weekly, coronaviruses.covid19, coronavirus

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

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  2. skybrian
    Link
    Bay Area wastewater surveys suggest COVID surge could be biggest yet (SF Chronicle) [...] The article includes a graph comparing testing and wastewater data.

    Bay Area wastewater surveys suggest COVID surge could be biggest yet (SF Chronicle)

    Currently, the region is recording far fewer cases — roughly 3,500 a day as of this week — but experts believe the actual number of infections may be anywhere from 2 to 10 times higher, as so many more people use home tests, the results of which are not reported to county or state public health authorities.

    [...]

    Other metrics, like COVID hospitalizations and the rate of tests coming out positive, can also be used to gauge the size of a surge, but they also have shortcomings. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by as much as a week or two, so aren’t great for understanding what is happening in the moment. And they paint an incomplete picture of how many infections are actually in the community, especially now that so many fewer COVID patients end up in the hospital thanks to vaccines. The positive test rate is somewhat more reliable, but it too can be influenced by human bias — people are more likely to get tested if they have symptoms, for starters, or if they already have a positive result on a home test.

    Currently, both hospitalizations and the positive test rate show the Bay Area in the midst of a significant surge, though not quite as large as the winter wave.

    Whether this surge has surpassed the omicron wave in terms of daily infections remains unclear. Rutherford guessed cases now were about 60% of the omicron peak, “but that may just be me putting on my happy face,” he said. Health officials in Santa Clara and Alameda counties said they don’t think this wave has quite hit omicron levels — but they added that they too can’t know that for sure.

    The article includes a graph comparing testing and wastewater data.

    4 votes