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Three days before Thanksgiving, a planeload of passengers from South Africa touched down in San Francisco. One of them was a woman who was in the early stages of a Covid-19 infection, though she wouldn't know it for almost another week. 

 

It happened to be the same day that scientists 10,000 miles away in Botswana and South Africa began alerting the world to a new and highly mutated version of the virus that causes Covid-19.

 

Alexandria Boehm, a professor of civil engineering at Stanford University, read about the usual pattern of mutations in the yet-to-be-named variant and sprang into action.

 

For more than a year, Boehm and her team of 45 people at the Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, have been collecting and testing daily sludge samples from wastewater processing plants across Northern California, hunting for fragments of the new coronavirus.

 

Wastewater-based epidemiology has proven to be so reliable in dozens of pilot projects across the US that the government has invested millions to create the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a network of 400 testing sites spread across 19 states that is coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

Boehm's SCAN is part of that network, which has been quietly operating behind the scenes, generating data for public health departments across the country, since September 2020.

 

For the first time, the CDC will publish data that looks at how much coronavirus is turning up in the country's wastewater. It will add this testing data to its Covid-19 dashboard.

 

Tests show that there's been a decrease in the amount of virus at two-thirds of the NWSS's 400 sites from levels measured 15 days ago, according to a CDC official familiar with the planning.

 

More than 500 sites will begin submitting data in the coming weeks, the CDC says. A media briefing on the surveillance system is scheduled for Friday.

Data from anywhere with a sewer connection
 

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is encased in an oily envelope. After it invades our bodies and begins to furiously clone itself, some of those copies are shed into our intestines, where the fatty parts of the virus stick to the fats in stool. When we poop, genetic material from the virus gets flushed down the toilet into the wastewater stream, where it can be detected by the same kinds of tests labs use to detect the virus from nasal swabs: real time polymerase chain reaction tests, or RT-PCR.

 

This kind of testing is highly sensitive. It can pick up the presence of the virus when just one person out of 100,000 in a given area, or sewershed, is infected.

 

And because wastewater testing doesn't depend on people to realize they're sick and seek out a test, or even to have symptoms at all, it's often the earliest warning a community has that wave of Covid-19 infections is on the way.

 

The CDC estimates that it takes five to seven days after a toilet flushes to get the wastewater data to its COVID Tracker, and and the samples typically turn positive in an area four to six days before clinical cases show up.

 

"As long as people are using a toilet that's connected to a sewer, we can get information on those cases in that community," said Amy Kirby, a CDC microbiologist who leads the NWSS project.

 

Government investment has taken what had been a little-known branch of public health and brought it into the mainstream.

 

"It's really exploded the field," said Colleen Naughton, a civil engineer at the University of California at Merced who runs the @CovidPoops19 Twitter account. "We did wastewater monitoring for other pathogens before this, like poliovirus, but it's really, the amount of people involved in everything has really increased exponentially."

 

Jumping into action
Speed is essential to making wastewater testing useful. So when Boehm heard the gravity behind the alerts of a new variant emerging 10,000 miles away, she didn't delay.

 

"It all happened very, very quickly, right around Thanksgiving and the holidays, which is a really inconvenient time for things to happen," she said.

SCAN -- a partnership between Stanford, Emory University and the University of Michigan -- worked long hours to change the monitoring system over to a new test.

The Monday before Thanksgiving, Boehm alerted her team to the new variant. On Tuesday, they downloaded the handful of gene sequences for the new variant that had been sent to GISAID, a website used by researchers around the world to share information about the new coronavirus. They started to design a test that could pick up several of its telltale changes, including amino acids that were deleted from a chunk of sites in its spike protein and the addition of three amino acids at another place on its spike.

 

Boehm ordered supplies: the chemical probes they would need to run their new test. She knew that delivery could take weeks, but she says they got lucky and got the new chemicals in just seven days.

 

But it wasn't just luck. She had done this many times over the past year, first for the Alpha variant and then Beta, Gamma, Delta and Mu.

 

While they waited for the supplies, Boehm dusted off an older test her team had been using to find signs of the Alpha variant. Like Omicron, Alpha is missing certain amino acids from a key location on its spike protein. These deletions cause a pattern on lab tests called an s-gene target failure.

 

"We knew Alpha was basically gone. It's extinct in our region," she said. That meant any hits on the Alpha tests were probably the new variant.

 

On Thursday, Thanksgiving, they got their first hit. A sample in Merced tested positive on the old test.

 

On Friday, the World Health Organization gave the variant they were hunting a name, Omicron, and officially listed it as a variant of concern.

 

The following Tuesday, another sample -- this time from Sacramento -- was positive, and on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the CDC announced that the first American had tested positive for Omicron in San Francisco.

 

The woman had recently traveled from South Africa, landing in San Francisco on Nov. 22. She didn't seek out testing until nearly a week later, on Monday, Nov. 28, four days after the first wastewater sample in Merced was positive.

 

In the days that followed, more positive samples turned up from Sacramento.

 

And in Santa Clara County, they got their first hit in Palo Alto on Dec. 7, the same day a person living in same sewershed became that county's first case.

 

What started as a trickle of positive samples quickly became a steady stream. On Dec. 16, the Santa Clara County Health Department hosted a news conference warn the public based, in large part, on what they were seeing in the wastewater data.

 

"When I look around the corner ahead, what I see is a deluge of Omicron. What I see is one of the most challenging moments that we've had yet in the pandemic," said Dr. Sara Cody, director of public health for Santa Clara County.

 

The limitations of wastewater testing
The CDC's Kirby says the system worked well for the arrival of Omicron in California. Colorado, Houston, and New York City. She published a snapshot of those efforts in the January 21 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

 

"What we hear most often is that our health department partners say this gives them confidence to know what's going on in their communities. So truly, are cases going up or down? And that's because it is completely independent of health care and clinical testing," she says.

 

Kirby says it's also a useful tool to let counties and cities know where to direct limited resources.

"So if you have, for example, mobile testing capacity, and you want to decide which communities could most use that additional testing capacity, wastewater surveillance is really useful for that," she says.

 

There are some blind spots in the system. Although 80% of homes in the US are connected to sewers, the other 20% or so rely on septic systems. These homes, which are mostly in rural areas, wouldn't be covered by the testing.

 

Wastewater testing is also harder to interpret and less useful in areas where people come and go often, like tourist destinations.

 

It's also difficult to compare data between sewersheds because different areas use different sampling methods. Some take samples directly from the water with thin cotton swabs encased in 3-D printed submarines, while others collect and sample biosolids. Sewersheds can be very different sizes, which also complicated comparisons. The CDC's new dashboard shows data at the ZIP code level.

 

Finally, this kind of testing can't signal when a community is free from the virus because the threshold of detection -- how many people have to be positive in an area to show up in a water sample -- isn't known.

 

For these reasons, the CDC says wastewater surveillance is best used along with case-based surveillance.

 

To avoid direct comparisons, Kirby says, the dashboard will compare each site to its own past results. The main metric will be the percent change concentration at the same site over the past 15 days. The other metric people will be able to see is how many detections there were over that same 15 days, how many samples tested positive at all.

 

"As you can imagine, right now, that's not a very useful metric, because everywhere is positive. But as cases go down and we see much lower rates, that will become the metric you'll want to follow to see if SARS-CoV-2 is re-emerging in your community," Kirby said.

 

Kirby says wastewater monitoring will be around long after Covid is gone, too. By the end of the year, the CDC plans to expand the number of pathogens tracked on the dashboard to include influenza, a fungal superbug called Candida auris, and foodborne threats like E. coli and salmonella.

 

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Hello Great River at Tribble Mill neighbors,

 

Time To Catch Up, our monthly newsletter, has been emailed to all of our residents that have email addresses on file.

 

If you did not receive it, go to

to stay in touch with what is happening.

 

If you have any comments, questions, issues or suggestions, go to

or email us at

 

 

 

 

 

The Tigers (13-5) got contributions from a large group of players led by

Ashanti Bryant and Courtney Nesbitt, who had 14 points each.

Bryant added four rebounds, three assists and one steal, and

Nesbitt had six rebounds, three steals and three assists.

Mearah Whitehead (eight points, seven rebounds, three steals),

Kyndall Collins (six points, five rebounds, three blocks),

Mia Walker (six points, four rebounds, one steal) and

Taniya McGowan (five points, three rebounds, three steals, two blocks) also played well.

 

https://www.Facebook.com/GreatRiverTribbleMill

https://tinyurl.com/GreatLifeGreatRiver

Contact The Board
www.GreatRiverTribbleMill.com/Contact-Us/
Send to HOA Board

Email: GRTMboard@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

I am sure that you have seen the Camp Gladiator's, "Gladiators" working out 

in the Commons area parking lot here at Great River at Tribble Mill. 

 

 

You probably thought, "What in the world are they doing out there and how can I do it, too."

 

Well one of our Great River at Tribble Mill neighbors, Rosha Lollar, is a certified 

personal trainer and is very passionate about fitness.

She has brought Camp Gladiator Fitness to Great River at Tribble Mill.

 

 

“I am passionate about fitness because I’m passionate about life.

 

 

 

 

 

Focuses on simplifying services and new biweekly recycling schedule for 2022.

“It’s a Beautiful Day in Lawrenceville!” is the new slogan for the City of Lawrenceville’s

Sanitation Department. Launching this month, the City is making an effort to simplify

its services for customers through smart infographics, calendars, direct mail, and a positive focus.

“Lawrenceville is a beautiful city,” said Mayor David Still. “Our Streets and Sanitation

employees play a huge role in keeping our city beautiful on a daily basis

through the many services they provide.

And what better way to be greeted than, ‘It’s a beautiful day in Lawrenceville!’ “

Over the last three years, the City of Lawrenceville has made several changes

in its sanitation operations to improve efficiency, including reducing weekly

trash collection from five days to four in order to allow one day per week

for employees to work on city projects.

“Many customers don’t realize how many services we offer,” said Barry Mock,

Assistant City Manager and Public Works Director. “Lawrenceville’s Sanitation

Department offers eight different services every week, many of which require a separate vehicle.”

A beloved free service of many long-time residents is the annual leaf service.

From November 1 – April 30, the leaf truck travels throughout the city limits

Monday through Friday, gathering leaves residents have raked to the curb.

Additional services include weekly trash collection, free mulch, curbside limb

and grass collection, prescheduled large item pick up,

curbside recycling, and a new glass recycling drop-off station.

The City of Lawrenceville opened a glass recycling drop-off station in October 2021,

accepting clear and colored glass, seven days per week, 7 am to 7 pm.

Located at Lawrenceville Public Works, 435 W. Pike Street,

users do not need to be a city resident to utilize the glass recycling station.

Another focus of the “It’s a beautiful day in Lawrenceville” campaign will be the

made the decision to switch to a cost-saving biweekly plan.

Residential addresses will be designated as a “blue” or “orange”

recycling week. After December 1, residents may determine their status by

visiting lville.city/MyCityServices and following the task bar on the left.

Prior to December 31, City Sanitation staff will also affix a blue or orange sticker

to each residential recycling bin, indicating the assigned week.

Customers with questions after December 1 should contact

customer service at customerservice@lawrencevillega.org or 678.407.6675.

The City’s Customer Service Department also plays an important role in

ensuring city sanitation and utility customers experience a beautiful day in

Lawrenceville. Customers are able to complete applications and paperwork

online, schedule service, set-up a bank draft, apply for a rebate and much more.

“The City has spent considerable time evaluating its Customer Service Department,

streamlining its processes, upgrading online payment options, and adding

additional online customer service options,” said Keith Lee, Director of Finance. “It’s a team effort.”

Detailed information about City of Lawrenceville Sanitation Services and the

“It’s a Beautiful Day in Lawrenceville” campaign can be found at 

lville.city/sanitation.

Sanitation customers are encouraged to watch their mailboxes and

utility bills for 2022 recycling calendars and other helpful information

in the coming weeks. Visit www.lawrencevillega.org for additional information

on the City of Lawrenceville and follow the city on

social media for important updates and featured information.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Alicia Z. Lawrenceville

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the FINAL DEADLINE for the names of our neighborhood high school graduates so we can all celebrate this milestone in their lives.

So after you have stopped crying because they are growing up or crying because they are still in your house,

 

please send their First and Last Names and a picture by THIS SUNDAY, April 26th, to this link

 

 

or email the information to 

 

We wish them all of the best in their future endeavors.

 

Please share this with all of your neighbors.