Wyoming COVID-19 Wastewater Monitor

Please note that, since December 2021, we have ceased collecting wastewater data. This site is still up for historical interest (and all the data is still available for download), but information here is obviously not current.

This dashboard is designed to give State and local officials situational awareness on trends of COVID-19 around the State, as measured in wastewater and modeled statistically. The primary outcome of interest displayed here is the estimated average number of viral copies per person in each community, measured on a logarithmic scale. This measurement is most useful as a proxy to illustrate trends we see across locations and over time, but has its issues, particularly as new variants with higher average viral loads are beginning to dominate.

If you're interested in the raw (and live) lab data itself, you can click here to download.

Participating sites in the system are shown as circles on the map below. The colors of each circle indicate the estimated severity of modeled prevalence (legend to the right). Dots with a red outline are estimated to have an increasing rate.

Dots that are greyed out do not have current (updated within 14 days) data.

Click on each circle to show data trended over time.

What am I seeing on these charts?

The modeled concentration shows our estimate of the trend of average viral load per person in each community. These estimates are the main deliverable of this dashboard. Essentially, we attempt to standardize the estimated sample concentrations by:

• The total amount of wastewater passing through each community when the sample was taken, and

• The total number of people in each community.

Note, however, that there are a lot of assumptions that go into this estimate, and the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. Different variants, for example, may shed in feces at different rates, so an increasing trend over time may not necessarily reflect increasing prevalence in the community.

Each estimate comes with a range of uncertainty, denoted by the shaded regions around the line. The inner (darker red) region is the 75% uncertainty interval, and the outer region is the 95% uncertainty interval.

The colored background ranges shown on the graph attempt to indicate, roughly, "how bad" the concentration is, based on historical experience.

The threshold cycle chart shows the raw data from the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory (WPHL). This data is the outcome of a quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) process. In the PCR process, the threshold cycle (Ct) count reflects the number of cycles required to amplify the viral RNA beyond a certain threshold. Generally speaking, lower threshold cycle counts indicate that there was a higher initial concentration of viral RNA in the wastewater sample.

The standard PCR assay that WPHL runs looks for two gene regions on the virus - N1 and N2. Since each sample is shipped in three (3) 50 mL vials, we display six (6) datapoints for each sample received.

The sample concentration chart translates the raw cycle threshold numbers for both the N1 and N2 gene regions into an estimated sample concentration (virus copies per mL), based on Ct counts from a known serially-diluted sample of SARS-CoV-2. For each 50 mL vial in the sample, we average the implied concentrations for N1 and N2, resulting in three (3) datapoints displayed on the chart.

For reference: Wyoming COVID-19 related hospitalizations