The first photo is the view from near my camp on Cloudy Pass. Today has been incredible but tough. Hiked 20 miles with 6400’ elevation gain. This is not like the PCT, it’s rough trails that go straight up for hours. But i’m so happy, I wanted an epic long weekend and Glacier Peak Wilderness is providing that in spades so far.
I've got some good news and some "hmmm..." news. The good news is we finally have some recent data for all three King County-area sites. Happy dance!!
The "hmmm..." news is the state has (as expected), switched the wastewater sample processing contractor and, thinking the new methodology isn't comparable to the old one, has consequently zapped all the old data. Which I really, really wish they hadn't done. Since we don't have accurate case count data any more, the only way I've been able to place wastewater numbers in context is by historical comparison. That's all gone now.
I'm attaching an image of the popup they have explaining this.
Very glad I decided to make the drive. I didn’t know what to expect but the views and trail are stunning. Lots of shade. I’m camped the first night a couple miles from Knife’s Edge and about 4 miles from Old Snowy Mountain. Should be on the ridge by sunrise so I can attempt to scramble up to the top of Old Snowy. Incredibly excited.
Mount Hood looks stunning from up here on Table Mountain. I was informed by a frankly terrified-looking day hiker that black bears were seen up here last night. I’m proceeding with caution and will update you if I encounter them. 🐻🗻☀️
Hey people in Washington State, have you written to WSDOT to ask them to revise their Amtrak Cascades long term plans to include faster travel times? Comments close on April 18, so please write now!
I used to be proud that Boeing planes were made in Seattle. Now I’m actually scared to fly on them. The McDonnell Douglas merger was the worst thing that ever happened to American aerospace.
This whistleblower’s death is profoundly suspicious.
If the Verily switchover is indeed on hold, then that does explain why the popup on the three King County sites on the #washingtonstate#covid#covid19#wastewater dashboard I tooted about yesterday said samples were being processed in the Public Health Lab now, rather than Verily. I hope other affected wastewater sites have similar resources they can call on.
Speaking of yesterday's King County wastewater toots, I have a small followup: I sent a polite note to the DoH public information officer, asking them to consider restoring the Biobot historical data. I don't know that it will do anything, but I figured it wouldn't hurt and it might help.
I used to think my #Triumph Bonneville T120 was slow, but recent rides like yesterday's to #Lake#Chelan taught me that all I had to do to make it fast was use more of the engine's rev range and engage my core when cornering. It's so much fun now! (8 photos here. More from yesterday's ride to come.) #motorcycle#photography#photog#photos#Washington#WashingtonState
90f (32.2c) degrees forecast in Seattle today, a new record for this day and the earliest 90+ day ever. It's been 8 months since we've had temps in the 90's in this area.
Here are some notes I put together on sources for #covid19#covid#wastewater data. This is mostly focused on #Seattle and environs in #washingtonstate, but most of these sources have data on other areas in the US as well. I'll pin this toot to my profile, with the expectation that it will get updated from time to time. Corrections/updates are welcome.
an at-a-glance map of the 15-day percentage change at treatment plants across the state ("statewide view"),
a line chart of 7-day rolling averages for specific treatment plants ("facility trends"),
a stacked bar chart of detected variant types for specific treatment plants ("variants").
All three tabs have downloadable data in Excel workbook format.
At present there are three King County area treatment plants represented: Brightwater, covering both King and Snohomish Counties; West Point, in King County; and King County South, covering both King and Pierce Counties.
For a while many sites weren't getting updated, and presumably this was fallout from the Biobot/Verily transition (see below). But as of 10/27/2023, nearly every site is being updated, with some of the data being provided by the state Public Health Lab. In some cases, there's a popup attached noting that the PHL methodology is different from the previous Biobot methodology, and so the historical Biobot data has been removed.
Strange quirk: if you download their dataset, you get the historical Biobot data for the sites that transitioned, but you won't get the new PHL data.
The dashboard as a whole gets updated every Wednesday. But you'll need to look at the dates in the underlying facility trends table to see how recent the site-level data are.
CDC's Covid-19 Wastewater Surveillance page
The CDC's National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) has a web page with national and regional trends for wastewater metrics. You can also look at state and county metrics for current virus levels, percent change in the last 15 days, and percent of samples with detectable virus.
There is also an option to download the entire data set, or data for a specific site. The data are in .CSV format.
This site uses a sewershed numbering system instead of names. I think the King County sewershed IDs map as follows:
2420 (previously 1142): West Point
2419 (previously 1139): King County South
676: Brightwater
The CDC recently switched from Biobot to Verily as a data source, and it appears that the changeover has disrupted the update cadence, at least for some subset of the sites. This includes the three #Seattle area sites.
Verily's COVID wastewater data is part of their multi-disease wastewater dataset. You can also download Verily's data in CSV format from this site: https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
Biobot
Biobot was the CDC's previous wastewater data supplier, but does continue to publish some wastewater data at its own site: https://biobot.io/data/
While there's no data for King County shown, it does show current sample results for several other Washington State counties.
There's no user interface element that lets you download the data. Behind the scenes, it is grabbing a CSV file of wastewater data, but more work would be involved to turn that into usable data.
Changelog
v1: October 18, 2023 - initial version
v1.1: October 19, 2023 - added link to Salon article
v1.2: October 27, 2023 - noted that almost all WA state sites are reporting data again, some via the Public Health Lab. Notes some sites have had Biobot-supplied historical data removed due to different sampling methods. Added Politico link about Biobot/Verily contract issues.
v1.3 October 31, 2023 - added Verily's new City of Snohomish to the Verily section. Noted the WA DoH quirk that you can still download the historical data that doesn't display in the UI, but not the new PHL data.
v1.4 November 2, 2023. Added a link to Katelyn Jetelina's summary.
Screenshot from a video taken as the International Space Station passed over Washington recently:
(top, l to r)
Olympic Peninsula
Olympic Mountains
Mt Olympus
Port Angeles/Ediz Hook
Sequim/Dungeness Spit
Discovery Bay
Port Townsend
Strait of Juan de Fuca
Salish Sea
Whidbey Island
Everett
Hello, Mastodon! May I introduce myself? I'm the Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum, located east of #Seattle on I-90. My interests include #education, #skiing, #snowboarding, and #history. And, like most Washingtonians, coffee and Sasquatch.
A Blue Angel FA-18 Super Hornet creating a condensation envelope as it flies by at 700MPH (just under Mach 1) only 50 feet off the waters of Lake Union:
Let's start with the West Point sewage treatment plant. The latest reading, done on 12/12, shows much improved numbers for the Sars-CoV-2 concentrations 7 day rolling average from the crazy rise of two weeks ago. But it also shows backfilled data for 12/5 and 12/10 of ... 0?? I ... I have questions.
Theory: they didn't have data for 12/5 and the zero reading is a placeholder value. Then they did get valid sample data on 12/10 (you can find it in the download file) but since they didn't have 12/5 they couldn't do the seven-day rolling average, so they left that as a placeholder value too. My inclination is to mentally draw a line from 12/3 to 12/12 and be happy that the trendline is good.
Note: when the state switched over to new data providers in September, they also removed the previous historical data from the graphical interface. That's because the two providers used different methodologies that made direct comparisons difficult. Unfortunately, it also removed valuable context for interpreting the results. So, keep in mind we're just seeing what happened in September 2023 until now.