UCSF Med School smartie and COVID-19 pundit Bob Wachter tweets that he's once again willing to dine indoors and unmask in small groups. This is exciting news for people like me who trust Wachter's judgement on such matters. It's also exciting because now I can tweak my COVID dashboard: before, I had just one snapshot of "safe" numbers; I can look at those numbers again for a second "safe" snapshot. E.g. what are COVID-in-wastewater levels like when it's safe to go out?
The last time Wachter felt safe, he said he wanted SF to have at most 40-80 new cases per day. Now he just says 80 new cases. I'd been using 40 as my dashboard's "safe" number. Now I'll double that.
The last time Wachter felt safe, the wastewater measure I use was 4 thingies; now it's 24 thingies, 6x higher. Hmm, I bet this means that recent wastewater data has not yet trickled in from all of SF's collection points. If I look at wastewater data next to other COVID-y measurements, they all seem roughly "in sync", but the wastewater levels spikes upwards in just the last few days, unlike other levels. Like, it's higher now than at this surge's peak back in November.
I guess I'll make a calendar appointment in a week to remember to check if more wastewater data has come in for today. Hopefully more data comes in and it puts the wastewater back "in sync" with the other…
Oh, and there was a weird thing in the SF testing data. I was fetching that as a JSON file. Its last testing data was Christmas 2022; but it said the file was keeping up-to-date; like, as of yesterday it said the most recent data in the city was Christmas 2022. If I visited the web page for the data, that web page no longer said JSON was available, just other formats like CSV. So I changed my script to download in a still-working format. But that JSON data was weird; if SF is no longer exporting their data in JSON format, I'd expect it to have old data, but also that the file wouldn't have been updated recently. Anyhow, getting clean data is tricky, yadda yadda.
