New Wastewater Report Shows Tulsa On Verge Of More COVID-19 Cases

COVID-19 detected in wastewater indicates Tulsa and Oklahoma City will see a continuing rise in infections – in addition to positive cases already identified.

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma said the numbers they've seen were enough to merit a new warning for public health officials about what's ahead.

OU has sampled wastewater since early in the pandemic and tracked how the virus detected there tracks with reported positive cases. Researchers consider wastewater sampling to be a more reliable indicator of infection in a population because it’s not dependent on people seeking out testing.

“We have a lead time of seven days. What we see today is what shows up seven days from now,” said Dr. Bradley Stevenson, an Associate Professor of Microbiology at OU. “We noticed that the values from May, early May to now are so incredibly high, at or above the highest levels we monitored during the first wave of the pandemic.”

"We're hitting a point where we're seeing levels like before the last surge and some of them are even higher and substantially higher," Halley Reeves, a Vice President with OU Health, said.

OU Health reported the most current tests results show Tulsa has more infection than Oklahoma City, but both are extremely high, from 33 to 67 times as high as levels in May, when infections were dropping, and before the Delta variant became the most common strain.