California-based engineer and scientist Patrick Vaughan made a troubling discovery July 10. Dozens of facilities providing COVID-19 wastewater data went offline, seemingly overnight.<\/p>\n
Vaughan had been following WastewaterSCAN, a national program that monitors wastewater for diseases. He noticed that 42 of the previously reporting 194 facilities suddenly displayed<\/a> small blue triangles with the message \u201cdata is no longer collected from this site.\u201d The development came just as people across the U.S. scrambled for information during a summer COVID wave<\/a> that even infected President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a major blow to our COVID wastewater tracking abilities,\u201d Vaughan told his followers in a video he posted the same day.<\/p>\n Wastewater, which comes from processes such as laundry or toilet flushing, has emerged as a key indicator for the prevalence of COVID-19 in the general population since testing rates plummeted<\/a> in 2022. State and federal governments have also unraveled many of the other metrics used to track the virus. For example, as of May 1, U.S. hospitals are no longer required<\/a> to report key COVID data to the government. Several states have also stopped tracking COVID-19 infection rates altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" California-based engineer and scientist Patrick Vaughan made a troubling discovery July 10. Dozens of facilities providing COVID-19 wastewater data went offline, seemingly overnight. <\/p>\n Vaughan had been following WastewaterSCAN, a national program that monitors wastewater for diseases. He noticed that 42 of the previously reporting 194 facilities suddenly displayed<\/a> small blue triangles with the message \u201cdata is no longer collected from this site.\u201d The development came just as people across the U.S. scrambled for information during a summer COVID wave<\/a> that even infected President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a major blow to our COVID wastewater tracking abilities,\u201d Vaughan told his followers in a video he posted the same day.<\/p>\n