This page is no longer being updated.
The MA Department of Public Health has resumed wastewater testing and now offers a dashboard for covid, influenza A, and RSV, at the same website as before.

They are now calculating WVA levels, which is an improvement over their previous dashboard. However, the new program only tests at 5 sites, all in the eastern half of the state. Testing in the western half of the state has been abandoned, which makes the DPH dashboard much less useful to us here.

For now, the best option available to us seems to be this new wastewater resource. This page, created by Ryan McCormick, builds a local wastewater report by pulling in data from the two nearest CDC testing sites based on your zip code (including across state lines), and calculates WVA levels for both. It does the same thing for influenza A. I can't vouch for it fully because he's not posting his code or fully detailing his methods, but so far it seems worth using.

Thank you to everyone who used this page, and especially to everyone who responded to the survey. Be safe out there. <3

Updates on Thursday evening, as long as new data is uploaded to the state dashboard (link below).

Regional Concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity Level

From 2025-07-24 to 2026-07-22
Current WVA level: Minimal
Current WVA score: 0.3
The above figure shows the regional wastewater COVID concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) for 9 sewer systems in Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data.

The above figure shows the regional wastewater COVID concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) for 9 sewer systems in Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data.


County-level Concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity Level

The above figure shows county-level wastewater COVID concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) for 9 sewer systems in Berkshire County (Pittsfield); Hampden County (Springfield); Hampshire County (Amherst, Northampton), and Franklin County (Greenfield, Montague, S. Deerfield, Sunderland). Concentrations below 1 copies/mL are cropped out to make the figures easier to read. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data. Blue annotations show the date of most recent report and the current WVA level.

The above figure shows county-level wastewater COVID concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) for 9 sewer systems in Berkshire County (Pittsfield); Hampden County (Springfield); Hampshire County (Amherst, Northampton), and Franklin County (Greenfield, Montague, S. Deerfield, Sunderland). Concentrations below 1 copies/mL are cropped out to make the figures easier to read. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data. Blue annotations show the date of most recent report and the current WVA level.

Individual System Concentration and Wastewater Viral Activity Level
The above figure shows reported concentration data and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) from 9 individual sewer systems in Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties. Concentrations below 1 copies/mL are cropped out to make the figures easier to read. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data. Blue annotations show the date of most recent report and the current WVA level.

The above figure shows reported concentration data and Wastewater Viral Activity level (WVA) from 9 individual sewer systems in Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties. Concentrations below 1 copies/mL are cropped out to make the figures easier to read. WVA levels are relative to the previous 12 months of data. Blue annotations show the date of most recent report and the current WVA level.

Technical Notes
• Wastewater Viral Activity levels are based on the CDC methodology linked below, with two differences:
(1) use of weighted statistics (median and standard deviation) to calculate thresholds, with population served and reporting interval as weights; and
(2) The baseline is updated each time the WVA is calculated, rather than every 6 months.
• The WVA is relative to the previous 12 months of data and is calculated independently for each panel. Because of this, WVA thresholds may be different across panels. The y-axis (copies/mL) is fixed, but the WVA levels are relative.
• The trend line is a smoothed conditional mean, specifically a Locally Estimated Scatterplot Smoother (or LOESS).
• All analysis and visualization is performed in R. Data and scripts are accessible in the github respository here: https://github.com/raughter/western-mass-covid.

Data Sources
• CDC methodology: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/about-data.html#data-method
• Wastewater data access: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/wastewater-surveillance-reporting
• Population weights are from various sources (EPA estimates whenever available).


If you have the means, you can buy me a coffee here https://ko-fi.com/raughter.
You can find my writing here https://cultureofhomecoming.substack.com/
Stay safe, y’all <3