Speaker 1: It's Thursday, March seventeen. I'm Oscar Ramrrors from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: More than a third of the CDCs wastewater samples across
Speaker 1: the US are showing rising COVID trends for the first
Speaker 1: two weeks of March. Sewer samples can often spot increasing
Speaker 1: virus levels before official test results. It's unclear if this
Speaker 1: points to an upcoming wave, but we currently have nine
Speaker 1: of the US population that is in places with a
Speaker 1: low community level rating. Drew Armstrong, Senior editor for Healthcare
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg News, joins us for what the wastewater is signaling.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, Drew, happy to be here. Well.
Speaker 1: Earlier in the week, actually, we did this story about
Speaker 1: the CDC wanting to expand the program that they have
Speaker 1: going that monitors waste water in the hopes to detect a,
Speaker 1: you know, future variants rising cases of COVID. That program
Speaker 1: it's kind of hit and miss right now. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of states that don't want to participate. There's some
Speaker 1: that are but aren't really providing all the data. And
Speaker 1: then I saw your article where we're already seeing some
Speaker 1: rising levels of COVID in the wastewater in some of
Speaker 1: these programs and these areas that are participating in this,
Speaker 1: and we've been seeing cases drop right now with COVID,
Speaker 1: but this could be a sign that things could be
Speaker 1: on the uptick. We don't know. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: variables at play with all of this, So Drew help
Speaker 1: us walk through some of this. What are we seeing
Speaker 1: in some of this latest wastewater data, sure, so you know,
Speaker 1: just to back up a little bit for everybody hitting
Speaker 1: this for the first time. Wastewater surveillance is a tool
Speaker 1: that public health teams can use to check for virus
Speaker 1: in a way that doesn't require people to go and
Speaker 1: get tested or to report their at home test results
Speaker 1: or anything like that. And it's great if it's a
Speaker 1: little bit gross, because our bodies give off virus or
Speaker 1: viral particles in all sorts of ways. And one of
Speaker 1: the ways that that happens is when people are sick
Speaker 1: and they poop, it goes into the sewer systems and
Speaker 1: you can then you know, find samples of virus after
Speaker 1: you scoop out a sample sewerwater basically and run it
Speaker 1: through some analysis. That can be really really useful, and
Speaker 1: what it's good at is detecting trends. It can tell
Speaker 1: you that the amount of virus in the wastewater is
Speaker 1: going up, or it can tell you the amount of
Speaker 1: virus in the wastewater is going down. And the nice
Speaker 1: thing about it is that it often will show up
Speaker 1: there actually a few days before people might test positive.
Speaker 1: So it's also really good at identifying things further in
Speaker 1: advance and might be happening, you know, when people are
Speaker 1: actually sick and going and to get tested. So it's
Speaker 1: one of these things that the CDC and state and
Speaker 1: local public health departments around the country use to try
Speaker 1: and identify. Okay, do we have a signal here that
Speaker 1: this is going up or down? And the good news
Speaker 1: is that since the peak of the opcron wave around
Speaker 1: most of the country, these signs have been going down,
Speaker 1: you know, just as positive test numbers been going down.
Speaker 1: We're at a very low level of cases right now.
Speaker 1: But the reason we decided to look into this and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's going on in players here, one just happened to
Speaker 1: know a whole bunch of people who had recently gotten
Speaker 1: COVID over the last couple of weeks and to you know,
Speaker 1: the US tends to follow this pattern that we've seen
Speaker 1: in Europe. They tend to be a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: ahead of US. And Europe is going to been going
Speaker 1: through a little bit of a surge in cases as
Speaker 1: they've lifted a lot of public health restrictions and come
Speaker 1: down off of their wave. And you know, it's not everywhere,
Speaker 1: it's not as big yet, but obviously something going on.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to look. We looked at the wastewater
Speaker 1: data for the last tend for the first ten days
Speaker 1: of March, and what we saw was this little signal
Speaker 1: in there where there were about a third of sites
Speaker 1: around the US where that we're pointing very much upwards
Speaker 1: in these super samples. We don't know what it means yet.
Speaker 1: We don't know if there's a real meaningful bounce in
Speaker 1: cases happening here or if it's just a little tiny
Speaker 1: bump coming off of a very low baseline. I think
Speaker 1: it is early. It's interesting something's happening there, but it's
Speaker 1: a little bit too early to know exactly what it means.
Speaker 1: It's totally interesting. I mean, the latest numbers from the
Speaker 1: CDC says that of the US population are in places
Speaker 1: with low community levels. Rating for cover growing now, which
Speaker 1: is great news. But to your point, right, this is
Speaker 1: kind of looking at trends. A lot of people right now, thankfully,
Speaker 1: are getting more milder cases. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: testing at home, so they're not necessarily reporting those things.
Speaker 1: They're just getting sick, they're staying home, they're taking the
Speaker 1: measures they need to get better, and boom they move on. Right,
Speaker 1: So a lot of these latest cases, latest numbers could
Speaker 1: possibly we could possibly be missing them. It's such a
Speaker 1: useful tool to look at the waste water. I don't
Speaker 1: think I've I can't remember the last time I took
Speaker 1: a PCR test in a way that's reportable. When I've
Speaker 1: gotten second it's just easier for me to do ADAM testing.
Speaker 1: I think that's true of a lot of people. And
Speaker 1: I'm like a good public health citizen. I cover the
Speaker 1: stuff the living. I've never reported my test result. I
Speaker 1: don't know anybody who has, you know. So ADAM testing
Speaker 1: is really good as an individual tool, and it has
Speaker 1: a lot of good things about it. For as a
Speaker 1: public HOUTOL, it's not good at is collecting data and
Speaker 1: having that data translated into things I have a theory,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, and if you talk to
Speaker 1: a lot of people who work on this, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we do know is that immunity to infection,
Speaker 1: you know, which can be very mild once you've been vaccinated,
Speaker 1: previously infected, that fades over time. Just again anecdotally, this
Speaker 1: is not data, but most of the people I know
Speaker 1: have gotten sicker, people who are vaccinated and got their
Speaker 1: boosters a while ago, right when they were first eligible,
Speaker 1: and had kind of gotten sick in this most reading
Speaker 1: in this last few weeks. It may just be that
Speaker 1: there's some fading of immunity while there's some virus kicking around,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people who have been taking a
Speaker 1: lot of precautions, who've been vaccinated, who were in these
Speaker 1: areas where you know, they got vaccinated a while ago,
Speaker 1: or there was a wave a while ago, you know,
Speaker 1: they are vulnerable to infection, maybe not to a severe outcome,
Speaker 1: but vulnerable new infection. We're kind of seeing these last
Speaker 1: little aftershocks of what it could be. I think we
Speaker 1: really don't know a great thing about sewer data is
Speaker 1: that it is well in advance of what's happening, sometimes
Speaker 1: by days or maybe even a week if we're lucky.
Speaker 1: The bad thing about sewer data is it doesn't tell
Speaker 1: you how many people are actually sick or you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't give you that kind of granular the data
Speaker 1: that you would really be able to get with comprehensive
Speaker 1: testing that gets reported in right. These could just be
Speaker 1: small local clusters of cases. Maybe not a huge trend
Speaker 1: or anything, but still just an interesting look. And as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that you know, the CDC wants to
Speaker 1: expand these programs, get more monitoring for more places, just
Speaker 1: so we can keep on top of this. But just
Speaker 1: interesting how this has gained some popularity at least looking
Speaker 1: into all of this stuff through Armstrong, Senior editor for
Speaker 1: Healthcare at Bloomberg News. Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez, and this has been reopening America.
Speaker 1: Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check
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