<story><title>Amount of Covid found in the wastewater in Boston</title><url>https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardtke</author><text>Be careful interpreting this.  Delta and now Omicron are more contagious than the original virus precisely because they have higher peak viral loads and shed more virus from infected patients.  Hence, the virus in wastewater per infected individual has been changing along with the number of infected individuals.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jointpdf</author><text>But Delta has been the only game in town for a while now (&amp;gt;99% of cases since late August), so this recent rise in the wastewater viral levels shouldn’t be attributable to a change in the proportion of variants (TBD on Omicron?).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;covid.cdc.gov&amp;#x2F;covid-data-tracker&amp;#x2F;#variant-proportions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;covid.cdc.gov&amp;#x2F;covid-data-tracker&amp;#x2F;#variant-proportion...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Amount of Covid found in the wastewater in Boston</title><url>https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardtke</author><text>Be careful interpreting this.  Delta and now Omicron are more contagious than the original virus precisely because they have higher peak viral loads and shed more virus from infected patients.  Hence, the virus in wastewater per infected individual has been changing along with the number of infected individuals.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itamarst</author><text>MA sequences 30% of PCR tests, and has so far found only a single Omicron case...</text></comment>