It's Thursday, March seventeen. I'm Oscar Ramrrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. More than a third of the CDCs wastewater samples across the US are showing rising COVID trends for the first two weeks of March. Sewer samples can often spot increasing virus levels before official test results. It's unclear if this points to an upcoming wave, but we currently have nine of the US population that is in places with a
low community level rating. Drew Armstrong, Senior editor for Healthcare at Bloomberg News, joins us for what the wastewater is signaling. Thanks for joining us, Drew, happy to be here. Well. Earlier in the week, actually, we did this story about the CDC wanting to expand the program that they have going that monitors waste water in the hopes to detect a, you know, future variants rising cases of COVID. That program it's kind of hit and miss right now. There's a
lot of states that don't want to participate. There's some that are but aren't really providing all the data. And then I saw your article where we're already seeing some rising levels of COVID in the wastewater in some of these programs and these areas that are participating in this, and we've been seeing cases drop right now with COVID, but this could be a sign that things could be on the uptick. We don't know. There's a lot of variables at play with all of this, So Drew help
us walk through some of this. What are we seeing in some of this latest wastewater data, sure, so you know, just to back up a little bit for everybody hitting this for the first time. Wastewater surveillance is a tool that public health teams can use to check for virus in a way that doesn't require people to go and get tested or to report their at home test results or anything like that. And it's great if it's a little bit gross, because our bodies give off virus or
viral particles in all sorts of ways. And one of the ways that that happens is when people are sick and they poop, it goes into the sewer systems and you can then you know, find samples of virus after you scoop out a sample sewerwater basically and run it through some analysis. That can be really really useful, and what it's good at is detecting trends. It can tell you that the amount of virus in the wastewater is going up, or it can tell you the amount of
virus in the wastewater is going down. And the nice thing about it is that it often will show up there actually a few days before people might test positive. So it's also really good at identifying things further in advance and might be happening, you know, when people are actually sick and going and to get tested. So it's one of these things that the CDC and state and local public health departments around the country use to try and identify. Okay, do we have a signal here that
this is going up or down? And the good news is that since the peak of the opcron wave around most of the country, these signs have been going down, you know, just as positive test numbers been going down. We're at a very low level of cases right now.
But the reason we decided to look into this and say, Okay, what's going on in players here, one just happened to know a whole bunch of people who had recently gotten COVID over the last couple of weeks and to you know, the US tends to follow this pattern that we've seen in Europe. They tend to be a couple of weeks ahead of US. And Europe is going to been going through a little bit of a surge in cases as they've lifted a lot of public health restrictions and come
down off of their wave. And you know, it's not everywhere, it's not as big yet, but obviously something going on. So we wanted to look. We looked at the wastewater data for the last tend for the first ten days of March, and what we saw was this little signal in there where there were about a third of sites around the US where that we're pointing very much upwards in these super samples. We don't know what it means yet.
We don't know if there's a real meaningful bounce in cases happening here or if it's just a little tiny bump coming off of a very low baseline. I think it is early. It's interesting something's happening there, but it's a little bit too early to know exactly what it means. It's totally interesting. I mean, the latest numbers from the CDC says that of the US population are in places with low community levels. Rating for cover growing now, which is great news. But to your point, right, this is
kind of looking at trends. A lot of people right now, thankfully, are getting more milder cases. A lot of people are testing at home, so they're not necessarily reporting those things. They're just getting sick, they're staying home, they're taking the measures they need to get better, and boom they move on. Right, So a lot of these latest cases, latest numbers could possibly we could possibly be missing them. It's such a
useful tool to look at the waste water. I don't think I've I can't remember the last time I took a PCR test in a way that's reportable. When I've gotten second it's just easier for me to do ADAM testing. I think that's true of a lot of people. And I'm like a good public health citizen. I cover the stuff the living. I've never reported my test result. I don't know anybody who has, you know. So ADAM testing is really good as an individual tool, and it has
a lot of good things about it. For as a public HOUTOL, it's not good at is collecting data and having that data translated into things I have a theory, which is that you know, and if you talk to a lot of people who work on this, one of the things that we do know is that immunity to infection, you know, which can be very mild once you've been vaccinated,
previously infected, that fades over time. Just again anecdotally, this is not data, but most of the people I know have gotten sicker, people who are vaccinated and got their boosters a while ago, right when they were first eligible, and had kind of gotten sick in this most reading
in this last few weeks. It may just be that there's some fading of immunity while there's some virus kicking around, and a lot of people who have been taking a lot of precautions, who've been vaccinated, who were in these areas where you know, they got vaccinated a while ago, or there was a wave a while ago, you know, they are vulnerable to infection, maybe not to a severe outcome, but vulnerable new infection. We're kind of seeing these last
little aftershocks of what it could be. I think we really don't know a great thing about sewer data is that it is well in advance of what's happening, sometimes by days or maybe even a week if we're lucky. The bad thing about sewer data is it doesn't tell you how many people are actually sick or you know, it doesn't give you that kind of granular the data that you would really be able to get with comprehensive testing that gets reported in right. These could just be
small local clusters of cases. Maybe not a huge trend or anything, but still just an interesting look. And as I mentioned earlier that you know, the CDC wants to expand these programs, get more monitoring for more places, just so we can keep on top of this. But just interesting how this has gained some popularity at least looking into all of this stuff through Armstrong, Senior editor for Healthcare at Bloomberg News. Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us in I Heart radio or wherever you get your pod. Gas