Alberta COVID-19 wastewater levels trending up in Calgary, Edmonton

COVID-19 wastewater data shows cases are rising again across Canada “(Calgary has) been coming down a lot,” Kevin Frankowski told Global News on Friday.

He is the executive director of Advancing Canadian Water Assets and co-lead of the pan-Alberta wastewater monitoring project.“We’re about 80 per cent of the way down the Wave 5 peak, and for a while it was kind of just staying at the same level.

And then the two of the last three data points (from between March 16 and March 23), it’s gone up a little bit.“Edmonton is similar, but it hasn’t had that step up that we’ve seen in Calgary.”He said Banff’s wastewater levels are seeing a recent upward trend, but Fort McMurray’s levels are trending downward, showing the regional nature of the pandemic in Alberta.“I think the core message is COVID still here.

We’re not out of COVID, it’s not over,” Frankowski said.Reading the statistically-noisy graphs on the University of Calgary’s Centre for Health Informatics’ (CHI) COVID-19 tracker is most useful when looking for trends, he emphasized.“If we see that the numbers are going up, then that can influence our decisions around (things like), ‘Maybe I won’t go to that concert,’ or, ‘Maybe I will voluntarily wear a mask.’”Wastewater data only shows how much virus is being shed by Albertans, not how many people are sick with COVID-19.“The reliance can’t be just on the wastewater data,” Frankowski said. “People need to also take into account the other information that’s available out there, including things like hospitalizations and ICU admissions, because what is obvious is that as the virus mutates and changes its severity, that changes its risk profile.”Dr.