As Orange County approaches 7,000 accumulative COVID-19 deaths, the Orange County Health Agency reported an additional nine deaths, with 236 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, April 6.

With Wednesday’s total deaths, HCA has reported 6,910 deaths since the pandemic began.

Still, while the daily COVID-19 case count remains low for the time being, Andrew Noymer, assistant professor of Epidemiology at UC Irvine, said at-home testing should not be the only method used to indicate the true presence of COVID-19 in the community. In fact, Noymer suggested that a clearer picture could be determined through wastewater samples.

“People are doing all these at-home tests, and in some cases, they’re not testing at all. So the testing numbers to come through official channels are a lot harder to interpret than they used to be. The people testing have changed a lot,” he said. “The problem is that you’ve got this curve on the number of cases, but it’s highly influenced by testing. What we really need is to cut out the middleman and start testing wastewater.”

Currently, in California, the California Department of Public Health heads all wastewater testing programs, according to the Orange County Health Agency.

It is unclear if CDPH is currently conducting tests on wastewater for COVID-19 locally in Orange County. The department did not respond to Irvine Weekly’s questions regarding any ongoing testing in Southern California.

“It’s such a valuable technique. I was skeptical two years ago that it was going to work. It’s not that I didn’t understand the science behind it, but lots of good ideas don’t work in practice,” Noymer said.

As other countries begin to brace for a potential wave of the emerging COVID-19 BA-2, Noymer said it will be difficult to predict how it will affect societies in different counties.

“Shanghai is on total lockdown, like big time,” he said. “It’s really tricky to extrapolate from one country to another. Germany is probably the best example that is having a big wave from BA 2 right now. But there’s no guarantee that we’re going to have a severe BA2 wave here — but you just can’t wave your hand and say it’s not going to happen.”

In Irvine, Deputy City Manager Melissa Haley said the city is still offering free COVID-19 testing at nearly a half dozen sites throughout the city.

“We still offer testing via our partner COVID Clinic. We have five sites in Irvine, one at the Great Park.”

More information on COVID-19 testing can be found here.

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