Add wastewater data

[jeanpaulrsoucy]

Wastewater data are now available from PHAC for 6 jurisdictions: Wastewater surveillance dashboard

[rahularoradfs]

Adding a +1 to this comment, although there are major questions about how to standardize this data - thinking about / reckoning with this at SeroTracker

[jeanpaulrsoucy]

For sure. Great work being done by Doug Manuel & team on the Public Health Environmental Surveillance Open Data Model, which I suspect feeds into the data presented on the PHAC dashboard.

[jeanpaulrsoucy]

We may be able to add to the data available directly from PHAC by scraping the data found at the individual PHU/municipality/organization dashboards linked at the bottom of the page.

[jeanpaulrsoucy]

What should be the value name for wastewater? Should we specify units (e.g., wastewater_copies_ml or wastewater_cp_ml) or use something more general (wastewater_viral_load). Regardless of the name, we will have to use a standard unit. Viral copies per mL (cp/mL) seems to be the way to go, per the [PHES-ODM](https://github.com/Big-Life-Lab/PHES-ODM).

I checked a handful of the other dashboards linked on the PHAC page, and these are the units they used:

• Ontario Science Table: standardized concentration of gene copies (about two orders of magnitude smaller than the PHAC numbers)
• Alberta wastewater tracker: copies/mL
• USask: normalized virus load/100mL (i.e., copies/100mL) (reports normalized virus load as well as Omicron-specific)
• NWT: copies/mL
• Quebec: Discontinued

So it seems reasonable to report a single value for wastewater_copies_per_ml or similar name. Perhaps additional details (e.g., normalized, average, N1 or N2) could eventually be reported using a grouping variable. Wastewater data using alternative units, on the other hand, probably merits a separate value.

There are also options to report more specific values like N1 or N2 copies, but perhaps this would go in the future "grouping variable" category.

[jeanpaulrsoucy]

The current adaptation of the PHAC wastewater dataset will continue to be maintained, but there is no capacity to add additional wastewater datasets at this time.