By Carly Severn
July 11, 2024
Updated July 23, 2024
Source: KQed
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
Levels of COVID-19 in the Bay Area’s wastewater are continuing to rise — and now, those numbers are as high as they were during the last winter surge of infections.
Data from Stanford University’s Wastewater SCAN project, which monitors the presence of COVID-19 and other viruses in human sewage across the U.S., indicates that COVID-19 levels are still on the rise across 61% of the sites monitored around the Bay Area. Statewide, California is currently in the “Very High” category for levels of the virus in wastewater, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.)
Wastewater SCAN’s Amanda Bidwell told KQED by email that COVID-19 has been detected in 100% of Bay Area sewage samples they’ve collected over the last three weeks. (If you have COVID-19, the virus will show up in your feces soon after you’re infected.)
What’s going on with COVID in the Bay Area’s wastewater right now?
The Bay Area’s own COVID-19 wastewater levels are “higher than where they were this time last year and on average as high as we saw during the winter peak earlier this year,” said Wastewater SCAN’s Bidwell.
In the last weeks, the Stanford team has observed a particularly pronounced rise in San Francisco’s wastewater. Bidwell told KQED that the data shows “some of the highest wastewater levels we’ve observed at these 2 SF sites to date.”
A graph showing Wastewater SCAN data from July 19 illustrating COVID-19 levels in San Francisco wastewater, aggregated from the city’s two wastewater sites. (WastewaterSCAN)
The San Francisco Department of Public Health told KQED in a June 11 email that it’s “difficult to determine an exact cause of why COVID-19 detections have increased” locally, noting that “it can be the result of various factors, including waning immunity, the increase in travel and gatherings associated with the summer season, and the emergence of new subvariants.”
The agency also pointed to the seasonal behavior of the virus in previous years, notably the “increase in COVID-19 activity around late spring to late summer, followed by another increase during the winter.”
Nationally, COVID-19 wastewater levels have kept rising across the country, and levels of the virus are currently classified as “High” on Wastewater SCAN’s dashboard of all its sites around the United States.
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