Just qualitatively eyeballing, the Boston wastewater data does look roughly like what I’d expect to see in a world where Omicron took over last week. And I consider that the single best US data source available—it is immune to almost all of the lag and selection effects which impact most other sources. It is the closest thing we have to a proper ground truth.
Omicron taking over late last week/early this week, at least in major urban centers, also matches what we’ve seen in London, and a priori I’d expect pretty similar timing here. I wouldn’t expect that we had substantially less international travel, or substantially slower spread; if anything, I’d expect things here to be a little faster a priori.
So, I agree the CDC’s data is not particularly informative on the currently-relevant timescale, but it seems pretty plausible to me that it’s off in the “Omicron cases were way underestimated, and total cases now are way underestimated” direction rather than the “Omicron cases now are way overestimated” direction.
Just qualitatively eyeballing, the Boston wastewater data does look roughly like what I’d expect to see in a world where Omicron took over last week. And I consider that the single best US data source available—it is immune to almost all of the lag and selection effects which impact most other sources. It is the closest thing we have to a proper ground truth.
Omicron taking over late last week/early this week, at least in major urban centers, also matches what we’ve seen in London, and a priori I’d expect pretty similar timing here. I wouldn’t expect that we had substantially less international travel, or substantially slower spread; if anything, I’d expect things here to be a little faster a priori.
So, I agree the CDC’s data is not particularly informative on the currently-relevant timescale, but it seems pretty plausible to me that it’s off in the “Omicron cases were way underestimated, and total cases now are way underestimated” direction rather than the “Omicron cases now are way overestimated” direction.