Week 8-9

Summer is in full swing and so are the mosquitos. In terms of my work at CSU things are going super smoothly. I feel like thanks to all our sorting days I'm much more confident in my ability to species mosquitos. I didn't realize just how many mosquitos CSU tests for Larimer county. It's a really cool partnership that I wish was more common. Emerald and I also got to do some outreach at a couple of different community centers, which was really fun! Everyone is really nice and wants to learn. However they also asked a lot of questions that I couldn't answer, especially about ticks.  I'm hoping I can learn more about them in the future so I'm more prepared next time. As for my work at Weld this summer has been really weird when it comes to mosquito numbers. Culex % in Weld County is the highest it's been in the last 5 years but overall mosquito numbers are down. Now it seems like we are in a wait and see state to see how these odd mosquito numbers will affect the epidemiological trends of human WNV cases. We've started to see human cases come in however I have no idea how the current numbers compare to in years past. That's some data I really wish I could see because I feel like it would be really insightful. I'm also surprised that we don't use GIS data to identify the most vulnerable areas in the county for WNV cases. But I also understand that just because we can ID where WNV cases live does not mean we can accurately ID where they got bitten and that's the data that's actually necessary.