Here are some notes I put together on sources for #covid19 #covid #wastewater data. This is mostly focused on #Seattle and environs in #WashingtonState, but most of these sources have data on other areas in the US as well. I'll pin this toot to my profile, with the expectation that it will get updated from time to time. Corrections/updates are welcome.

If you're looking for an explainer about the current state of wastewater surveillance and how to understand its data, Betsy Ladyzhets at The Sick Times wrote a great article: https://thesicktimes.org/2024/07/23/wastewater-surveillance-for-covid-19-keeps-evolving-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Washington State Respiratory Illness Dashboard

This site is run by the WA Department of Health and has statistics for multiple respiratory diseases in the state. The dashboard is here:
https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/diseases-and-chronic-conditions/communicable-disease-surveillance-data/respiratory-illness-data-dashboard

Here's the link to jump directly to the wastewater data:
https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/diseases-and-chronic-conditions/communicable-disease-surveillance-data/respiratory-illness-data-dashboard#WasteWater

It has three tabs, plus a FAQ:

an at-a-glance map of the 15-day percentage change at treatment plants across the state ("statewide view"), a line chart of 7-day rolling averages for specific treatment plants ("facility trends"),
a stacked bar chart of detected variant types for specific treatment plants ("variants").

There is also a "Downloadable Data" button that gets you a CSV with per-facility wastewater data for Sars-CoV-2, plus influenza A and B and RSV. Interestingly, the downloadable data is population-normalized in a way that you don't see on the facility trends page. Its sample units are reported as "Normalized Pathogen Concentration (gene copies/person/day)."

At present there are three King County area treatment plants represented: Brightwater, covering both King and Snohomish Counties; West Point, in King County; and King County South, covering both King and Pierce Counties.

For a while many sites weren't getting updated, and presumably this was fallout from the Biobot/Verily transition (see below). But as of 10/27/2023, nearly every site is being updated, with some of the data being provided by the state Public Health Lab. (There used to be a popup attached noting that the PHL methodology is different from the previous Biobot methodology, and that therefore the historical Biobot data has been removed. I haven't seen that popup in a while, though.)

The dashboard as a whole gets updated every Wednesday. But you'll need to look at the dates in the underlying facility trends table to see how recent the site-level data are. Sometimes the downloadable data trails the graphically-presented data, so I check recency by right-clicking the specific facility view and selecting "show as table," and scrolling down to look at the last entry for the timestamp.

King County's Respiratory virus data dashboard page

King County also reports wastewater data for the three facilities listed in the State's dashboard, also based on the State's Public Health Lab data. You can find it at: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/disease-illness/respiratory-virus-data. The latest sample date is given on the lower left-hand corner. It's a pretty basic chart -- for example, there's no download option -- but if the State's wastewater dashboard didn't get updated in a given week, you can often find the most-recent PHL data here.

CDC's OG Covid-19 Data Tracker Wastewater Surveillance page

The CDC's National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) has two different web pages for wastewater metrics and visualization. I'll start with the original page, which covers national and regional trends. You can also look at state, county and sample site metrics for current virus levels, percent change in the last 15 days, and percent of samples with detectable virus.

This OG CDC page is here:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance

There is also an option to download the entire data set, or data for a specific site. The data are in .CSV format, and data definitions are here: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/reporting.html. A link for the entire dataset is here: https://data.cdc.gov/Public-Health-Surveillance/NWSS-Public-SARS-CoV-2-Wastewater-Metric-Data/2ew6-ywp6.

This site uses a sewershed numbering system instead of names. I think the King County sewershed IDs map as follows:

2420 (previously 1142): West Point
2419 (previously 1139): King County South
676: Brightwater

These three sites, along with about 25% of all the CDC NWSS sites, were affected by fallout from a data source contract switchover. In a nutshell: Biobot was the original data provider for a subset of the sites; in mid-September 2023 when the contract concluded the CDC awarded the new contract to Verily instead; Biobot filed a complaint about the contract, with the Verily contract on hold until the complaint is resolved some time in 2024; the CDC NWSS site lost over 400 sites out of its dataset as a result; and in mid-November the CDC created a short-term contract and awarded it to Verily to get those sites back online. As the contract dispute has evolved, there have been a few press articles. Salon has an article about the switchover and its impacts here: https://www.salon.com/2023/10/19/a-lapse-in-wastewater-detection-is-worrying-scientists-about-distorted-data/ Politico has an article here: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/26/detecting-covid-surges-contract-dispute-00123787. Katelyn Jetelina ("Your Local Epidemiologist") has a summary of the wastewater contract situation and its impacts here: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/wastewater-switch [yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com].

CDC's New Covid-19 Wastewater Surveillance page

The CDC got complaints that their original wastewater site was hard to understand. So they've created a simplified NWSS portal, at https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-currentlevels.html.

They broke down the detected viral activity level into ten levels, and have a map that color-codes each state according to the calculated level category. You can select national regional trend visualizations, state trend visualizations, and a variant breakdown trends page. There's also a link back to the OG Data tracker page.

The state trends page is here: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-statetrend.html. The nice thing is they figured out a way to harmonize the sample data across different providers. So you can see how today's reported state-level numbers look compared to, say, January 2023, before the big Biobot -> Verily switchover. There's no county-level data, but I've read that such a feature is on their roadmap.

There's an explanation about how they calculated the viral activity levels here: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/about-data.html. You can get the underlying data used in the map visualization here: https://www.cdc.gov/wcms/vizdata/NCEZID_DIDRI/NWSSStateLevel.json

Verily

As I mentioned in the section on the CDC page, Verily is the new data provider for wastewater surveillance. Their wastewater testing dashboard is here:
https://publichealth.verily.com/?v=SC2_N&l=Coeur+d%27Alene%2C+ID

As of this writing, there's one Washington State site, the City of Snohomish, listed. It is up to date.

Verily has a good description of their methodology here: https://publichealth.verily.com/about.

Verily's COVID wastewater data is part of their multi-disease wastewater dataset, hosted at WastewaterSCAN.org. This site has data at the national, regional, and sample-site level. You can download this data from: https://purl.stanford.edu/mz061vb5322.

Biobot

Biobot was the CDC's previous wastewater data supplier and was for a while continuing to publish wastewater data in a dashboard at https://biobot.io/data/. But as of May 14th, 2024, they've sunsetted their dashboard. See the announcement here: https://biobot.io/from-raw-data-to-actionable-insights-biobots-evolution-of-public-data-sharing/. Biobot will instead present their illness risk analysis in the form of "Respiratory Risk Reports," available here: https://biobot.io/latest-report/.

Dashboards for other areas

CovidDataDispatch.com maintains a list of U.S. wastewater dashboards at: https://coviddatadispatch.com/wastewater-surveillance-data-in-the-u-s/

CovidPoops19 maintains a list of wastewater dashboards across the world at: https://ucmerced.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c778145ea5bb4daeb58d31afee389082

Changelog

v1: October 18, 2023 - initial version
v1.1: October 19, 2023 - added link to Salon article
v1.2: October 27, 2023 - noted that almost all WA state sites are reporting data again, some via the Public Health Lab. Notes some sites have had Biobot-supplied historical data removed due to different sampling methods. Added Politico link about Biobot/Verily contract issues.
v1.3 October 31, 2023 - added Verily's new City of Snohomish to the Verily section. Noted the WA DoH quirk that you can still download the historical data that doesn't display in the UI, but not the new PHL data.
v1.4 November 2, 2023. Added a link to Katelyn Jetelina's summary.
v1.5 November 30, 2023. Added information about the new CDC NWSS visualizations. Added more background about the CDC Biobot/Verily contract dispute.
Washington State Department of Health logo
v1.6 May 18, 2024 - Spring cleaning! Updated for WA respiratory illness dashboard changed; added link to King County's wastewater page; added some information about the CDC's new NWSS pages; updated the Biobot section with their dashboard sunset announcement.
v1.7 August 13, 2024 - added pointers to lists of wastewater dashboards across the US and the world; added a link to Betsy Ladyzhets's wastewater explainer; updated link to WastewaterSCAN downloadable data; minor tidying up.
V 1.7 1/1/2025 - updated link for King County wastewater data.

I'm overdue for an #introduction, especially with all you new followers…so here goes.

I'm a software engineer with a degree in Anthropology. I highly recommend the combo.

Most recently I was tech lead for Scaled Human Review at Meta. I worked in the Integrity Foundation (what other companies call "Trust and Safety") on Better Engineering initiatives and #Metaverse integration, with the teams that build human review software for the 30-40K external reviewers. I'd sworn I’d never work at Facebook, but I decided to see if I could make a difference. I couldn’t. And it wasn't a good fit for either of us. But I learned a lot about how the sausages are made and why they have such a hard time with #contentmoderation.

I've been on #socialmedia for four decades (seriously, I saw someone catfished in chat in 1978—this stuff isn't new), and virtually everyone I know I met online somewhere—many I've still never met in person. Needless to say, that's made me pretty passionate about making online communities safe for everyone, and especially marginalized groups.

I'm now a freelance #consultant, working on my own projects (I'll write more on that later), and with my wife's #consulting company (see below). I'm planning to do a lot more writing about #society and #technology (as well some #SFF), and to travel more.

I tend to write long posts (like this one). They may get shorter once my blog is back up. I don't stick to one topic, but I'll try to tag them so you can filter. I post about tech stuff (recent, as well as old geeky #Unix stuff), #social issues, #LGBTQ issues (especially the T), pretty #photos, and random personal anecdotes. When I boost, it's because I think it's something that might be interesting to someone, or some group, that follows me. Those tend to include all the above topics, plus SF&F-related things, and cool science stuff.

I'm #pan, #poly, #nonbinary (or #genderqueer, if you prefer). I prefer "they" for pronouns, but "he" is fine. I spent most of my life thinking I really was a straight cis man who just happened to be a bit quirky and a passionate and tearful ally, so I'm not too picky about how you refer to me. I'm also more than happy to answer any questions about all that, public or private.

I grew up mostly in #Maine and then lived in Massachusetts for a long time, but I now live on sovereign #Swinomish land in #WashingtonState (US), on the edge of the San Juan islands. Despite my first name (that's a story) and current location, I'm not Native American, although I focus a lot on Native American rights. My parents were both active in that area, and that was my introduction to civil rights in general.

I've been a #software engineer at various levels (from programmer to CTO to company founder) for 40+ years. I learned BASIC in high school, taught myself Pascal, FORTRAN and PL/1 in college, learned C as an intern at Bell Labs (Murray Hill, one floor up from the Unix crew), and went on from there. In college, I majored in #Anthropology with a concentration in #Psychology, and that's influenced the way I look at software ever since. Software is designed for people. Software systems build communities (whether intended or not). Anyone who does that damn well better understand how people and #communities work.

I've worked for Bell Labs (psych stats), Sperry Research (window systems, UX design), Apollo/HP (programmable shell, windowing systems, Unix porting, UX design), Bright Ideas (cookbook, educational games), OSF (windowing standards), Alfalfa (multimedia email - SMTP *and* X.400 :)), Wildfire (phone-based voice assistant), Utopia/USWeb (web and security consulting), Saroca (small boats), Messagefire (anti- #spam software), MessageGate (corporate compliance software), Somewhere (software consulting), ZeeVee (web video aggregation, metadata scraping), TiVo (video content correlation, #metadata pipelines), and Meta. Plus a few others.

I've been with my wife, Dr. Mollie Pepper, for over a decade. She's a #sociologist with a focus on #refugee migration, #gender, and violence; the kind of work that gives you PTSD. She did her dissertation on women's roles in the (now extremely defunct) peace process in #Myanmar (aka #Burma). A year ago she was at a military base frantically processing thousands of Afghan refugees and managing translators. She has a consulting company that specializes in evaluating and designing refugee service and placement programs. You can find her at https://carlsonpepper.com/. Everything I know about #feminism, #intersectionality, #queer theory, #CRT, and #racism I either learned from her, or she gave me the theoretical underpinnings to understand them properly.

I have two grown daughters from my first marriage with Nassim Fotouhi; a kick-ass software engineer/engineering manager who came to the States just before the Iranian revolution.

Shadi Fotouhi is an artist (see my profile background photo, go look up the drug codes and compare them to the mermaids' behavior) turned software engineer; building dynamic room installations will do that to you. She worked in QA at a gaming company, and then at Jibo; a robotics startup. Now she's a senior software engineer at Wayfair--Kubernetes, release configuration, and all that fun stuff.

Shireen Hinckley is a documentarian, digital image technician, video editor, and co-founder of Somewhere Films (https://www.somewherefilms.com/shireen-hinckley); a womxn's filmmaking collective. She works for #Beyoncé at Parkwood Entertainment, where she's an editor and post-production supervisor for all of their video releases. She worked on "Black is King" and just about every video since then, whether it's for Instagram, Times Square, Tiffany's, the Oscars, or Chloe x Halle. No, I can't tell you when the Renaissance visual album will be out—but it will be amazing.

I'm incredibly honored to have those wonderful women in my life. I wouldn't be who I am without them.

A couple other things that may come up, especially in my photos. My mother is an artist who lives in Maine in a round house she designed, and the family built, when I was in high school. And I'm part owner of a #lighthouse on Cape Cod.

--kee