Framingham’s daily rate of known new Covid-29 cases per 100K population was down again this week – as was the number of “official” PCR tests administered to city residents. Cases declined at twice the rate that tests did, though, which is good news.
There were 33.6 known new cases per 100K population in Framingham in the 14-day period ending June 11 – a drop of 20% from the prior week, according to data released today by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Number of tests reported to the DPH declined 10%.
Test positivity was down to 7.5% from 8.5% in last week’s report – still higher than the WHO recommended 5% threshold.
Before we get too complacent about these numbers, however, the recent case rate is almost the same as the February 17 report – 33.6 per 100K this week vs. 32.9 in mid-February. But test positivity was 4.5% then vs 7.5% now, a sign that we’re missing many more cases in official data (which we know, since home testing is increasingly common and many state free testing centers have closed). And, more than 9,000 official tests were administered in the February 17 two-week period compared with just 5,022 in the current report.
MWRA South region wastewater tests for Covid traces showed a spike in today’s report to more than a 1,000 UNITS. That number does tend to jump around a bit, but note that levels have been consistently higher than at the end of the Omicron surge, when levels were below 200 in late February and early March. If we’ve plateaued, it’s at a pretty high rate (although still substantially lower than the height of the Omicron surge).
For anyone interested in some general reading on Covid-19, a couple of interesting tidbits popped up in my Twitter feed today. One rather counter-intuitive study found that due to what’s called “immune imprinting”, it’s possible that “infection + vaccination doesn’t necessarily improve your immune response. If an early infection was with a specific variant different from the current one, it could even dampen the response to the new variant.”
Check out this Twitter thread by Dr. Deepti Gurdasani or the original research paper in Science.
And for those interested in long Covid, “Clues to Long Covid: Scientists strive to unravel what is driving disabling symptoms”, a news analysis also at Science, looks at three theories about the cause of long-term effects from Covid and whether they’re related.
More graphs of Framingham data at my Framingham Covid-19 data app and statewide data, including by community, at my Massachusetts Covid-19 data app.
See latest Covid-19 data coverage at http://www.district2framingham.com/tags/covid19/.
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