The CDC Covid Data Tracker Wastewater Surveillance dashboard aggregates all wastewater data submitted directly to CDC's NWSS DCIPHER platform. Sample data is standardized and represented by dynamic charts and maps which may be downloaded either as a chart (.png) or a as a raw .csv file.
The steps below detail how to navigate and download data from the CDC COVID Data Tracker.
1. Access the CDC Covid Data Tracker Wastewater Surveillance dashboard here.
2. Scroll down to the section giving you the option to search by State or territory or County.
3. Select your State or territory and County (in this example we use Greenwood, SC).
4. Select a metric (in this case we use ‘Percent change in the last 15 days’ metric)
Wondering which metric to use? See the Footnotes section at the bottom of the page. It explains each metric in detail. In addition, if you toggle each option as you click, there is a short explanation that will pop up (seen in gray, below).
If the site of interest is gray, or not appearing with a certain metric, first consult the footnotes. Reasons for sites to be unavailable are explained there. There can be many temporary reasons for a site to appear as a gray dot. It may be due to factors such as data availability or site suppression.
5. Scroll down to the interactive map to see sewersheds located within the selected county. The color coding of the circles represents the value of the selected metric.
6. Click on one of the circles to see a pop-up chart with a line representing the smoothed concentration information over the last four months for that location.
7. If you wish to download a csv file of the data shown in the line chart for that location, click the ‘Download’ button.
8. To download the metric data for the time period shown on the wastewater page, first click the plus sign (+) next to “Data Table for Wastewater Surveillance Percent Change in Last 15 Days” and click the “Download Data” button.
9. To download the historic data for the selected location, first scroll down to the ‘Download Data and Footnotes’ section of the page and select “View Historic Wastewater Data” and then “Export” on the “NWSS Public SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Metric Data” page.
The ‘Footnotes’ section acts as an FAQ for the dashboard, covering definitions, metrics explanations, and data descriptions.
Additional resources are also available at the bottom of the Footnotes section.
If you wish to see greater data details than available in the Historic Wastewater Data, please submit a public data request email nwss@cdc.gov with the subject line ‘NWSS public data request.’ You will be required to sign a data use agreement.