Allegheny County to rely more on wastewater surveillance to calculate spread of covid-19

Two years and two days after the first covid-19 cases were reported in Allegheny County, Health Director Dr. Debra Bogen closed the latest chapter of the pandemic with optimism and provided insight on the new ways health officials will communicate pandemic data.

The county will move away from biweekly briefings about the virus’s toll but continue to put out detailed weekly reports that will eventually include wastewater surveillance data to paint a more accurate portrait of viral loads across the county, Bogen said.

She said that will be especially helpful as more and more people rely on at-home covid tests, which generally are not reported to the county. Hospitalizations are not the best measuring stick either, she said, as they often lag several weeks behind cases.

Related:

• What to know about omicron subvariant

Samples are taken from wastewater in the county about three times per week and analyzed at a lab in Florida. The wastewater that is analyzed covers about 80% of the county’s population.

“It really gives us a good look at what’s happening in the county as a whole and it’s really a way for us, in real-time, to look at whether we’re going to be seeing a rise in cases,” Bogen said.

She reflected on two years of the pandemic, which took hold in Allegheny County before she’d even officially taken up her post as health director.

Allegheny County recorded its first covid death on March 21, 2020. Since then, 3,218 more have died across the county — more than four people per day, Bogen noted grimly.

“An entire family lost every 24 hours,” she said.

Now, two years later, nearly all of the county’s roughly 1.25 million residents have some form of immunity: 970,000 people are fully vaccinated, and around 262,000 have contracted the virus at some point, said County Executive Rich Fitzgerald.

“How does one measure the past two years?” Bogen said Wednesday during the first in-person covid-19 briefing in more than a year. “Before I can answer that question — or at least provide some perspective — let me be clear: This is not farewell to the pandemic. We are not claiming victory or shifting to treating covid like we do influenza.

“The next and final chapters have not been written, and I will not pretend to predict them,” Bogen said.