- Dr. Allen, you've been following Boston's wastewater testing.

It's been a big story that we've followed.

Not very glamorous work here, but as we've learned, extremely informative.

What are you learning?

- Yeah, I've been tracking this for a while now.

It's a great service, great thing we're doing in Boston here, and it's an early indicator.

For those that don't know it, it's looking at the virus in wastewater and so, it's a real way to look at population level dynamics ahead of cases.

So by the time we get case reports, people have to be infectious, they have to go get tested.

The wastewater is basically telling us, giving us a couple day lead time on that, and it predicted correctly that we would have a surge of cases in Boston in December and January.

And interestingly, right during our peak cases in January, the wastewater data started to curve down, so we knew that this drop that happened in February, March was going to happen.

Also, the wastewater data, once it was dropping, it actually leveled off.

It plateaued unexpectedly in March, and this is right when cases started to do that too.

So it's a really nice indicator, a leading indicator, of what we should expect in terms of cases and just the most recent dataset that dropped two days ago shows that we came off this plateau.

And again, the wastewater data, the virus in wastewater, is starting to decrease again, and hopefully, headed towards back to the lows from last summer.