The CDC Has an Eye on Your Poop
What goes down your toilet will end up in a spreadsheet. Poop is powerful when it becomes part of a larger dataset, now that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has added wastewater data to its Covid-19 tracker, as of last Friday.
People infected with Covid-19 leave traces of the virus in wastewater, making sewage analysis a useful means of tracking the rise of the virus in certain communities and even the emergence of new variants.
Sewage data tells the story of the near future by predicting coronavirus spikes up to a week before official case counts and revealing how vastly undercounted cases of variants like Omicron have been. It’s no wonder that wastewater has been called the “Covid-19 crystal ball” by New York Magazine.
Indeed, sewage analysis is becoming a metric of vast public health matters, even beyond the pandemic. The power of data in the collective tracks to trends such as Data Divinity and, yes, Waste Positive, giving a second life to something we take for granted in the privacy of the bathroom.
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Anna is the Editorial Director at sparks & honey and author of sparks & honey’s cultural intelligence reports. She eats blueberries at 5pm every day, and when she's not writing, Anna is running across bridges in NYC, taking photographs along the way.