This is a CLI tool for helping people make informed decisions about COVID risk. COVID testing has become less accessible, resulting in a 69.36% test volume decrease from Nov 2022 to Nov 2023 (data available here). Given the reduction in test volume (and abundance of unreported at-home test results), wastewater analysis is one of the few remaining tools for gauging comparative COVID risk. This tool is intended to be equally useful for ad-hoc usage as a CLI tool or programmatic / scripted usage.
If you've worked with me before, you may be aware of my love for sparkline charts, a type of small chart usually used in financial reporting, and often included in-line with text. Sparkline charts in a terminal environment are a convenient, legible tool for making sense of large datasets.
Install nodeJS, either directly from their website or through nvm (node version manager).
Install wastewater globally using npm (npm install wastewater-cli --global).
Note that ellipses (...) are used for brevity, and represent ommitted data similar to that above and below it. Also note that many of the options for the tool have aliases, both for singular and plural usage (id and ids or county and counties) as well as common synonyms (output and format). The examples build on each other; I recommend reading them through from start to finish.
Notice that, since there's an Orange county in multiple states, this command filters both by state (--state) and county (--county). The default view is a sparkline of the amount of COVID detected in wastewater by day, as a percentage of the worst recording at that site. For instance, if the worst recorded day was a week ago, and today is half as bad, the value for a week ago would be 100, and today would be 50.
> wastewater history --county Orange --state Florida
Existing data found. Using it.
████████████████████████████████████████ 100% | ETA: 0s | 741807/741807
Treatment plant in Florida (#1715) serving 183,009 people in Orange county:
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Treatment plant in Florida (#1735) serving 51,000 people in Orange and Seminole counties:
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You can also use a specific plant ID or IDs instead of a state and/or county, and you can output CSV instead of sparklines (--format). Note that this example also re-downloads the dataset, even if it's available on disk (because of the --refresh flag); this can be helpful if you have an incomplete CSV file, or want to make sure that you have the latest data saved locally. Local data should be at worst one day old.
> wastewater history --ids 2420 676 --format csv --refresh
Existing data found, but refresh argument provided. Downloading fresh copy now.
Done downloading new data.
████████████████████████████████████████ 100% | ETA: 0s | 745063/745063
id,state,counties,location,population,dateStart,dateEnd,changeOver15Days,percentile,firstSampleDate
676,Washington,"King,Snohomish",Treatment plant,288000,2023-09-06,2023-09-20,,58.0,2023-09-20
2420,Washington,"King,Snohomish",Treatment plant,789000,2023-09-05,2023-09-19,,7.0,2023-09-19
...This example uses one plant ID. Note that it does not output any of the progress bars or text (because of the --quiet flag).
> wastewater history --id 2420 --quiet --format json
{
"2420": [
{
"state": "Washington",
"id": "2420",
"location": "Treatment plant",
"counties": [
"King",
"Snohomish"
],
"population": "789000",
"dateStart": "2023-09-05",
"dateEnd": "2023-09-19",
"changeOver15Days": "",
"percentile": "7.0",
"firstSampleDate": "2023-09-19"
},
...
]
}JSON and CSV output (when in --quiet mode) are easy to embed in bash scripts and other automated workflows. This example pulls the most recent reading's percentile value for a given plant.
> wastewater history --id 2420 --quiet --format csv | tail -n 2 | head -n 1 | cut -d ',' -f 10
66.0
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