At least someone noticed

[edschweppe]

Remember yesterday, when I commented that the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority SARS-COV-2 wastewater levels just skyrocketed? The Boston Globe has now noticed that big jump:

The levels of coronavirus detected in Eastern Massachusetts waste water, an important indicator of the prevalence of COVID-19 infections, shot up sharply this week.

Officials say waste water data from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority can be an early warning signal, detecting COVID-19 infections before people get tested and the tests are officially reported.

The latest waste water data posted by the MWRA covered samples taken up until Tuesday. The numbers had been fluctuating for several months, but began rising steeply on Saturday.

"The wastewater data has been really good at predicting a coming wave of COVID and, given that we've just come out of the [Thanksgiving] holiday, it's very unsurprising that we would see an increase in cases," said Matthew Fox, a professor of epidemiology and global health at the Boston University School of Public Health.

[ ... ]

"We've got a pretty highly vaccinated population so, while I do expect to see an increase in cases, the hope remains that we will not see a very sharp rise in hospitalizations and deaths," Fox said.

However, the rates of Boston residents who have received Omicron specific bivalent boosters has remained low - a cause for concern among many public health experts - and there are clear racial disparities in who is getting boosted. Only 7% of Latinx residents and 9% of Black residents have received the bivalent booster, compared to 11% of AAPI residents and 13% of white residents, according to data from the Boston Public Health Commission.

The BPHC is working to close that gap and has opened free vaccination and testing sites across the city, focusing on communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic including Roxbury and Dorchester.

"Most Americans have not gotten booster shots yet, and even people who have are probably well beyond the point where they have a lot of protection from whatever their last dose was," said Andrew Lover, assistant professor of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This lack of coverage may mean that new variants like BQ.1 and XBB, which are on the rise in the city and around the country, may impact the U.S. more severely than countries like Germany and France, where the newest variants have caused only small upticks in cases and hospitalizations, he said.

Over the past two weeks, COVID-19 cases in Boston have increased by 14% while hospitalizations increased by 24%, according to the Boston Public Health Commission. That's in addition to an outbreak reported Wednesday at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, Mass., where at least 13 residents and four staff members have been infected with the virus.

Julia Raifman, assistant professor of Public Health at Boston University, said this is the time for decisive action by policy leaders to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illness, including implementing mask policies and increasing testing.

"We need leadership to create in a virtuous cycle of caring about one another and protecting people who are disproportionately harmed by COVID and the other respiratory viruses," she said. "That takes policy leadership, we see that nothing an individual can do is nearly as powerful as what a policymaker can do for reducing transmission."

Of course, the probablility of a lame-duck Baker administration actualy demonstrating "policy leadership" is, for all intents and purposes, zero. (Feel free to prove me wrong, Governor.)