Covid-19
Other countries are still testing, counting, and reporting the prevalence of covid-19—but not in the U.S. Even when you see numbers reported, they are big undercounts, and really shouldn’t be reported at all. Cases are hardly ever measured. Not all hospitals are reporting admissions or treatments, yet aggregate numbers are still reported. Deaths may still be valid, but run the same problem of “with covid” vs. “by covid”. So is there anything left, for those of us interested in knowing the level of the “community spread” of the virus, so we know what are the appropriate risk reduction measures to take?
Yes—the sampling of the covid-19 virus in sewage. We’ll be looking into this more in the coming weeks. Some of the sampling isn’t reported too well, but there is one national website that aggregates the data from a fairly representative cross-section of the sampling locations. (For New Hampshire, for example, it includes three of the fourteen total locations.) The website is
https://biobot.io/data/covid-19
and here is a recent graph. I have been hoping for the numbers to fall to the July 2021 levels, or at least to the March 2023 levels, but such is not the case. It’s too early to really tell, but the latest numbers are rising slightly, perhaps due to air conditioning and people cocooning inside buildings to avoid the smoky air outside.
Wildfire Smoke
And speaking of smoke, at least we have good monitoring data on this! The best site I’ve found that uses the weather modeling is windy.com—select the PM2.5 page to show the smallest and most dangerous aspect of the smoke. AND they show predictions for the next few days. Where you click on the map is where they give you a numerical result. Here’s an example where the clicked spot is just at the top edge of the best Grade A air, shown in blue.
Another interesting site is purpleair.com, which uses crowd-sourced readings from individual meters. Here’s an example at the same time as the windy.com page. Purpleair.com uses the EPA’s color coding which goes from green (best) to worst (purple).
As we reported before, the best protection if you have to be out in the smoke is an N95 mask, or a Safetulator HEPA filter mask. And for the N95 masks, get ones with an “exhalation valve”, which give you better quality air to breathe, with more filtered fresh air and less of your own exhaled air. We’re still looking for the best make and model, but you can check your local hardware store. This type of mask is what they stock for shop work and construction work to protect people when dust is being generated. Be sure you have a tight enough fit so that when you exhale, you can feel with your hand the warm air coming out of the valve.
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