United States | News & Politics

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Reported levels of the virus in U.S. wastewater are higher than they have been since the first Omicron wave, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though severe outcomes still remain rarer than in earlier pandemic winters.

Many of the metrics used early in the pandemic have become much less useful indicators of how widely the virus is spreading, especially since federal officials stopped more comprehensive data tracking efforts when they declared an end to the public health emergency last spring.

Higher population-wide immunity has meant fewer hospitalizations even with high virus spread, and the sharp decline of Covid test results reported to authorities has made case counts far less relevant.

The amount of RNA in the sample will fluctuate depending on many factors, including the local population at any given time — think of a holiday influx into Miami or a college town emptying out for summer — and how much other material, such as industrial waste, is in the system.

(Two companies that analyze wastewater, Verily Life Sciences and Biobot Analytics, also aggregate data from hundreds of sites and offer national and local pictures of virus spread.)

Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and chief science officer for eMed, estimates the real amount of Covid spreading could be quite a bit higher or lower than this time last year.

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