BY RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

The tools for monitoring the presence of COVID in our communities have decreased dramatically over the last year or so. Thus, monitoring the virus that causes COVID in our wastewater has become even more important than earlier.

Los Alamos County has contracted for the monitoring of our wastewater in both Los Alamos and White Rock for:

 SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)
 RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus)
 Influenza A
 Influenza B

In this manner, our wastewater surveillance can serve as a signal not only for the extent to which COVID is present in our community, but also the extent to which several other viruses of
importance may also be present.

The County has not actively brought the data from this wastewater monitoring to the attention of the community, but you can find weekly updates at

https://www.losalamosnm.us/Health-and-Public-Safety/Community-Health/Wastewater-Monitoring

In addition, the County apparently lacks and has not contracted the technical capacity to interpret wastewater surveillance data for the community and point out its meaning for our personal behaviors and public health practice. Community members will largely need to do this themselves.

I would encourage community members, therefore, to regularly check the County’s wastewater
surveillance page, noted above. A quick glance at the data, particularly for Los Alamos, should make clear if the presence of COVID and the other viruses in the community is “going up or down.”

One can also compare present data to earlier data to get a sense, for example, of whether we are having a “wave” of infection, and, if so, how high that “wave” is. As the fall progresses, regularly examining the data on the “seasonal viruses” Influenza A, Influenza B, and RSV will also become increasingly important to you and your family.

The latest COVID data, by the way, suggested that around early August 2024 we started a new “wave” of infections that was the 7 th highest “wave” since the summer of 2022. No RSV,
Influenza A, or Influenza B was present in the latest wastewater samples, as one would expect
this time of year.

(Richard Skolnik is the former Director for Health, Nutrition, and Population for South Asia at the World Bank. He was a Lecturer in Global Health at The George Washington University and Yale and the Executive Director of a Harvard AIDS treatment program for three countries in Africa. Skolnik is also the Instructor for the Yale/Coursera course Essentials of Global Health, and the author of Global Health 101, Fourth Edition.)