Davis wastewater data shows increase in COVID-19

Wastewater-based disease surveillance contributes to greater health equity and is essential for monitoring viruses

BY LA RISSA VASQUEZ city@theaggie.org

Throughout January, COVID-19 levels have fluctuated, but are significantly higher in Davis than in other parts of Yolo County, according to wastewater monitoring in the city of Davis and UC Davis wastewater plants by Healthy Central Valley Together.

Dr. Heather Bischel, project lead for wastewater monitoring for Healthy Davis Together and assistant professor at UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, explained how wastewater can reveal COVID data.

“Wastewater has a lot of different pathogens present in [it] that people excrete if they’re infected,” Bischel said.

“The virus itself can be measured in wastewater [and] Wastewater SCAN is this large program that is now established where the city of Davis and UC Davis are participants in.”

Wastewater SCAN is a national wastewater monitoring project from Stanford University that has been rapidly expanding over the past six months as many different groups across the nation begin to launch their own wastewater monitoring projects since the pandemic.

Healthy Central Valley, an offshoot of the Healthy Davis Together campaign, highlighted the need for monitoring in the central valley long before Wastewater SCAN was established. In an email, Dr. Colleen Naughton, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Merced and wastewater monitoring project co-lead with Bischel, talked about the organization’s goals.

“We had seen that there was a lack of wastewater monitoring for SARS-CoV-2 throughout the Central Valley compared to urban and coastal California and wanted to see expansion of this public health tool for greater health equity,” Naughton said.

Wastewater-based disease surveillance contributes to greater health equity due to its cost-effective and unbiased testing of samples representative of an entire community, according to Dr. Bischel.

“After you’ve had a rising infection of [COVID-19], you’d expect the concentrations to go up during those relative surges, to see different signals for different viruses, and then they evaluate the wastewater against clinical information,” Bischel said. “What we monitor in the wastewater does correlate with what we know about transmission and infections, and that makes the wastewater data really useful for public health because then you can get an idea of the changes in terms of infections for these different targets.”

Different targets include other respiratory viruses such as RSV, influenza and other coronaviruses including variants of the SARS-COV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Bischel talked about how wastewater can measure other viruses.

“In addition to measuring the total amount of [COVID-19], we’re also able to target some specific variants and to measure the concentrations of different variants. [The Omicron variant] may be a bit more challenging [because] it’s the combination of recombinant variants that has genetic components from different variants,” Bischel said.

“The data that we’re looking at for the city of Davis and UC Davis campus was focused on that kind of total amount of [COVID-19] present, and understanding trends as they go up and down through time, and then we have some additional information on variants that can help complement [and] inform our understanding of new variants [as they] come through. How one [variant] is taking over relative to another.”

Naughton explained why variants such as the Omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5, are still a challenge even in a largely vaccinated community like Davis.

“The City of Davis may have a high full — two doses — vaccination rate, but much of the country has not gotten their booster doses, especially the new bivalent boosters that are more effective against the current variants,” Naughton said. “Also, the current variants are very transmissible and many of our prior precautions, like indoor masking, reduced travel, etc, have been lifted and people are mixing more and more likely to spread and catch the virus. The vaccines are still effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths, but you still can catch COVID-19 and have mild symptoms.” The Davis community’s best defense continues to be wearing well-fitting N95 or KN95 masks in crowded indoor spaces, staying home when feeling sick, being up to date on COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters, testing for COVID-19 before events or travel and washing hands with soap and water, according to Naughton.

“We may be tired of the pandemic and the virus, but it is not tired of us. We must still follow public health guidance,” Naughton said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t go about our lives, seeing loved ones and eating at restaurants but we can reduce our exposure when we can by wearing face coverings in crowded indoor settings and staying up to date on vaccinations. [...]. With an expansion of rapid tests that are not reported to the health departments, wastewater is a reliable indicator of the level of infection in the community.”

UC Davis Mental Health Initiative conference raised awareness for mental health advocacy and promoted several on-campus student resources

BY LILY FREEMAN campus@theaggie.org

On Jan. 21 and Jan. 22 UC Davis Mental Health Initiative (MHI), a student organization dedicated to mental health advocacy, held the 2023 Mental Health Conference.

Dylan Ocampo, a fifth-year biopsychology major and the unit director of MHI, described the goals for the two-day event.

“We just wanted to give folks the space to unpack these topics that we don’t necessarily discuss within our daily spaces,” Ocampo said. “A lot of our advocacy stems from educating the people who come to events like our conference and then for them to spread what they unlearned and learned to their peers and communities.”

Two keynote speakers were featured at the event, according to Ocampo. Jenee Darden, an award-winning journalist, public speaker and mental health advocate, and Imadé Borha, a writer and mental health advocate who founded the nonprofit Depressed While Black, both spoke about their work on Black liberation within the mental health field.

The conference also included a variety of workshops surrounding intersectionalities within mental health, which Ocampo said included topics like substance abuse, the Latinx and Hispanic communities, the connection between hip-hop music and mental health, the neurodivergent perspective and how to build healthy relationships through setting boundaries.

Following these workshops were student and professional panels meant to facilitate conversation between attendees and community members dedicated to mental health advocacy, as well as “caucuses,” or small-group discussions between attendees. Ocampo explained that the discussion-based caucuses explored intergenerational trauma, toxic positivity and productivity culture.

The conference ended with a resource fair featuring several oncampus mental health organizations. Aggies for Recovery, the Aggie Mental Health Ambassador Program, the Willow Clinic, the UC Davis Love Lab, the Aggie Compass Basic Needs Center and the UC Davis LGBTQIA+ Resource Center were just some of the organizations that attended.

Reflection From The Cover

Wiles then invited those gathered into a full minute of silence from 12:10 p.m. to 12:11 p.m. before ending her speech by asking people to turn to someone next to them and share something that they liked about the UC Davis community.

Zhou spoke next. His speech referenced UC Davis’s Principles of Community and encouraged students and other listeners to strive to maintain a culture based in these principles.

“We have an obligation to build and maintain a culture and climate based on mutual respect and caring,” Zhou said. “Let us come together to support each

Johnalyne Love Samson, a fourthyear psychology major and the chief of staff of MHI, explained her main takeaways post-conference.

“One of the lessons MHI has taught me is that we need to make time for the things we want to happen,” Samson said. “Destigmatizing mental health happens when we put effort into starting conversations with others about things we often only let ruminate inside our own thoughts.”

Radhika Gawde, the ASUCD president, spoke on the conference’s focus on diversity and intersectionality in their programming from her perspective as an attendee.

“MHI’s focus on intersectionality is incredibly important as the impacts of factors such as race, gender and socioeconomic status are often overlooked in conversations about mental health,” Gawde said.

MHI is currently working on its upcoming May Mental Health Awareness Month project. Ocampo explained that the organization’s recognition of the national awareness month will consist of weekly events and advocacy projects surrounding a variety of mental health topics.

Natalie Bruch, a fourth-year psychology major and the publicity coordinator of MHI, emphasized the next event, “Brain Freeze,” for community members to look forward to on Feb. 18. MHI will have various destressing activities available for students to participate in at the event, according to Bruch.

“We will be partnering with the Entertainment Council to put on the Brain Freeze event, where Raveena, the singer, will be performing,” Bruch said. “It is an event to help students de-stress mid-quarter.”

Ocampo ended with his reflections post-event.

“I always tell my team no matter how big or small the contributions you make towards mental health, they still matter,” he said. “The conference just reminds me of our impact on the broader whole community, even if we may not see the total scope of our impact. We have each other and community to rely on, and this conference helped me feel this and see it in action.” other in this difficult time.

In the end, I believe that love, unity and compassion will always triumph over hate, division and violence.”

The event was put together very quickly, according to a recent press release, with the idea coming from Cecily Roberts, the director of the Women’s Resources and Research Center. The release said that organizers thought “[it] was important to acknowledge the difficulty of continuing on with daily tasks at work or school when so much tragic news is weighing heavily.”

After the event, there were artificial white roses with positive quotes attached available for community members to take home, and attendees were encouraged to stick around and talk to those around them.

Teachingprizedonation From The Cover

Eadie explained that he and his wife, Jane Eadie, who currently works on the Chancellor’s Board of Advisors, wanted to create this scholarship in order to increase the number of professionals in the wildlife biology field with diverse cultural backgrounds and provide greater opportunities to incoming students.

“With the prize money, it was a no-brainer,” Eadie said. “It is a great jump-start, and we can establish it right away. Jane and I, and perhaps others, will hopefully contribute continuously throughout the years.”

The scholarship has now been signed off on and will be available for incoming undergraduate students in the WFC department for the 2023-2024 academic year.

Eadie reflected on his overall experience working at UC Davis, given that he is planning to leave the university next year.

“I [plan] to retire in a year from now,” Eadie said. “[Davis] has been such a great campus to work at; the students are great and the staff are fantastic, and our department is amazing. It’s just been a really great ride. I feel pretty lucky– I don’t know how I got so lucky.”