It's flu season; it's almost Thanksgiving; it's been 6 months since the COVID-19 public health emergency was declared over in May, and 11 months since I last caught COVID.
I've been thinking a lot about risk assessment and how individuals can be empowered to make intentional decisions. Plummeting daily test volume (down 69.36% YoY, data available here) makes me wary of reported case count, and the increased accessibility of at-home tests (and gradual shutdown of reporting infrastructure for positive tests) makes me less trusting of positivity rate. The external effects on both these metrics tend towards under-reporting, effectively diminishing perceived risk.
Given this, I think wastewater analysis is one of the few remaining tools for gauging comparative COVID risk. This strategy has flaws - it measures comparatively to other points in time, is susceptible to different COVID variants confounding the numbers, and is easily "reset" by changing the reporting ID of a given wastewater treatment plant. Despite all this, it's one of the best tools we have for answering pragmatic questions like, "am I more likely to catch COVID now than last month? Roughly how much more or less likely?"
So I built a CLI tool called wastewater for querying and restructuring the CDC data in a format more useful to me (and hopefully you).
I'll write more later about developing CLI tools quickly in node, but for now - I hope this tool helps you! The installation instructions are available here.