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Orange County Utilities says based on wastewater sampling that delta and omicron variants of the coronavirus are still in the area. Although omicron tends to be the more prevalent variant in Orange County, officials are warning residents that the more deadly delta hasn’t completely disappeared. Ed Torres, director of Orange County Utilities, says both variants have been detected in wastewater sampling that his department conducts. “Just to give you an idea, the omicron variant is circulating in our community between 97 percent to 99 percent. So it’s almost all omicron. Even though that, we still have the more dangerous delta.” (Prieur, 1/12)

Boston area epidemiologists are seeing signs of hope in the city’s wastewater samples, which show levels of COVID-19 in the region dropping off at a rapid rate. Data released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s tracking system, which analyzes genetic material in the Boston area’s sewer system, shows that virus levels have plummeted to 6,000 RNA copies of COVID per milliliter from a peak near 10,000 a few weeks ago. Harvard Medical School administrator Stanley Y. Shaw cautioned in a Twitter post that the data are not necessarily a reliable indicator of pandemic trends but may yet offer “a glimmer of better days ahead.” Bill Hanage, an associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, discussed the figures in a Twitter thread. (Vaziri, Ho, Beamish and Fracassa, 1/12)

Yale University researchers have developed a wearable passive air sampler to monitor personal exposure to COVID-19, they reported yesterday in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based air sampler, the Fresh Air Clip, continually monitors exposure to virus-containing aerosols, which could prove helpful to workers in high-risk settings such as healthcare. ... The highest viral loads (more than 100 RNA copies per clip) were found in two clips worn by restaurant servers. (1/12)

Michigan health officials are disputing a report that they say is expected to allege the state undercounted potentially hundreds or thousands of COVID-19 deaths of residents at long-term care facilities. In a recent letter to the Michigan Office of the Auditor General released Tuesday, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Elizabeth Hertel says the auditor general made a series of errors, including conflating death definitions, examining data from facilities not required to report deaths and using sources that are unreliable. While the auditor general's office declined to comment on the report, Hertel's letter indicates the state anticipates it will say the department undercounted the number of long-term care residents who died because of COVID-19 by nearly 30%. (Boucher and Hall, 1/12)

Covid’s omicron variant is currently tearing through the U.S. and the rest of the world at a record-breaking pace — but Bill Gates sees hope on the horizon. Once the current surge abates, countries can expect to see “far fewer cases” through the rest of 2022, Gates wrote on Tuesday during a Twitter Q&A with Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. Once that happens, Gates continued, Covid can most likely “be treated more like seasonal flu.” (Huddleston Jr., 1/12)