19 ms·
Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
- jgalt212 4y agoThe longer a society wears masks, the sicker everyone will be when they eventually come off. In the formerly overly cautious US Northeast, kids are getting sick left and right this school year. And COVID is the least dangerous bold-faced name they need to worry about.
- amilios 4y agoThis is an absolute myth. There is no evidence of "immunity debt", and serious public officials parrotting this nonsense are doing real damage. It's a tempting explanation because it's simple and seems to make intuitive sense, but it's just wrong. The explanation that has much more evidence is that everyone and their dog caught COVID, and COVID has been directly linked to lasting immune system damage, making everyone more susceptible to catching these other viruses. https://globalnews.ca/news/9272293/immunity-debt-covid-19-misinformation/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9272293/immunity-debt-covid-19-mi...
- anon_coward_ghk 4y agoIt seems anything that could hurt pfizer or Moderna stock is "misinformation". "In fact, Furness likens the immune system to a collection of photographs. When people take photos and put them away in an album, the photos don’t fade over time just because they aren’t being looked at regularly." By that logic I must not need my yearly flu shot because my flu "photo" hasn't faded. Clearly if I wasn't exposed to rsv (and it's most recent variants) my immune system can fight it just as strongly because I have that photo from two years ago. Also, tetanus vaccines every 10 years, that must be bs.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoThe 2021 flu shot was a different vaccine than the 2022 flu shot. Or to stretch the analogy, it's a different photo of a similar subject
- anon_coward_ghk 4y agoYes but the tetanus toxoid is the same toxoid it's always been. It is disingenuous to suggest that the immune system doesn't atrophy some with time. It's much more nuanced really, but humoral immunity in particular wanes with time.
- funstuff007 4y agoThere is no evidence of "immunity debt", and waning immunity are one and the same. So if think one is myth, you believe both are myths.
- funstuff007 4y agoFurness seems to have only a cursory understand of immunity (despite all his credentials). Boosters and yearly flu shots just some simple examples of how the immunological world does not work the way he describes. Too many public health officials are unwilling to admit they made mistakes and gave bad recommendations early in the pandemic. He should correct his errors or step down.
- arikr 4y agoSee also: https://biobot.io/data/ https://biobot.io/data/
- mutagen 4y agoPopped in to share this one, it has COVID data on my area while the Verily site doesn't seem to yet. I've been using wastewater data to adjust my behavior since official testing and reporting is down and under-reporting cases. Detected COVID goes up, I reduce my exposure and remind my vulnerable loved ones. Detected COVID goes back down, I adjust my behavior accordingly.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoThere are some seriously long delays and gaps in wastewater reporting, though. They only do it in my local area very 6 weeks or so.
- larsiny 4y agoOddly, this site doesn't report for my local counties that are listed as having submitted data to CDC's NWSS (King and Pierce counties in Washington State). I wonder if the more "popular" counties are pay-walled or something? EDIT: According to the site, "County Selection: Counties associated with each location were provided by our sampling partners, and correspond to the primary county served by each sampling location. In the county-level section we highlight a subset of counties which had at least 21 weeks of data and whose sampling locations represented at least 10,000 individuals, as well as the primary counties of our sampling partners in the Biobot Network." So I'm curious what other factors are excluding the largest (by population) counties in Washington?
- cgb223 4y agoLots of cities missing from this, many exist but lack any data Not sure how helpful this is when huge swathes of the population aren’t represented here
- amalter 4y agoWastewater facilities are almost always run by local government. I expect it takes time to get buy in for a project like this. I didn't see if there was a grant to cover the testing, but you at very least need a worker to package up samples and mail them to a lab. Still, this is tremendously useful where there is coverage, and looks like enough data to make sampling type of conclusions. Hopefully we'll eventually see some kind of network effect. For example, I'm in the NYC area - and Newark NJ has coverage. There is enough overlap that I expect flu and covid curves (including strains) to be close enough to be interesting.
- datameta 4y agoWith fewer people commuting to work there's less overlap, but enough new yorkers have family in NJ and vice versa that I suspect suspect Newark should be pretty accurate for NYC +/- 5-15% with a lag time of a week max.
- Eric_WVGG 4y agohere's the CDC charts, includes NYC https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveil...
- spacefracas 4y agoIt's Suspect that adjacent cities have such divergent trends. For example Novato vs San Rafael CA. Novato: http://publichealth.verily.com/#Novato,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2 http://publichealth.verily.com/#Novato,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2 San Rafael: http://publichealth.verily.com/#San%20Rafael,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2 http://publichealth.verily.com/#San%20Rafael,%20CA:SARS-CoV-...
- jeffbee 4y agoThis is not suspicious at all. San Rafael has a combined sanitary and storm sewer system. In the California rain season their sewer is diluted with rain water. Novato has separate sanitary and storm water systems.
- meroes 4y agoI don't find it suspect (well, suspect of what exactly?) as a native to these cities but I may lack perspective. Go one city over all over the Bay Area and you get wild differences. There's a lot of land between north bay cities too. Also, weren't we all just using these divergences a year ago to back up Covid statistics - i.e. Santa Rosa was higher than surrounding cities from my recollection, and that was "expected" one you knew the areas.
- mistrial9 4y agoan eighty year old in either place may rarely talk to anyone, while a commuting Dad with kids in pre-school may get involuntarily exposed every single week. There is some truth to geographic locality for disease, but there is also Car Culture in the USA.
- ropeladder 4y agoWastewater surveillance is a pretty crazy technology. My neighbor works on projects using it for wildlife tracking, and they can get startling amounts of information about what is going on in a given watershed. What (e.g endangered) animals are present, what animals humans are eating, etc. And all the way down to the viral level, obviously.
- jdadj 4y agoI’m confused. How is wastewater from endangered animals ending up in the sewage system? Surely they’re not using toilets…
- londons_explore 4y agoThere is always a little that drains in... Often these tests are done on river water too. And PCR tests are super sensitive.
- ropeladder 4y agoSorry, my comment was a bit misleading: as the other commenter noted, they are doing testing in rivers, etc. When animals defecate/urinate onto the ground, some of it eventually gets carried and aggregated into flowing water.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoI am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so I do feel more protected now, but there’s still a risk. Wear a mask and wash your hands folks!
- rajup 4y agoMasks are unlikely to have protected you much unless it’s a tight fitting n95 mask worn around the clock. This topic has been beaten to death on here, not sure why people continue to cling on to masks as anything other than security theater.
- deanc 4y agoAt this point, I’d tend to agree. However, this is a bit of a broad and inaccurate statement. Wearing masks gave society time to catch up in terms of vaccinations and other measures.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
- KerrAvon 4y ago
- ryandrake 4y agoOP has entered basically every COVID thread since 2020 to make the same kinds of comments. I guarantee, you're not going to dissuade him. You're exactly right, though, COVID and its associated "symbols" like masks have turned into a weirdly politico-religious topic for some.
- dmix 4y agoI remember during the tail end of the pandemic someone posted a link to a big spike in wastewater COVID testing in our city's sewers. So I decided to pay close attention to the COVID test rates/hospitalizations for the next 2 months. But I never ended up seeing any correlation. The trendline stayed stagnant, before declining as it did everywhere else. I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.
- thehappypm 4y agoIt’s been extremely reliable in Boston.
- aaroninsf 4y agoDepending on when/where that was during the pandemic, unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless, and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors). Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard... ...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem. Sigh.
- jpollock 4y agoSanta Clara has data for the south bay, and I couldn't find it on the verily page. https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
- jefftk 4y agoIt's not on the Verily page because Santa Clara's monitoring isn't a Verily project. The page has "Source: Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN) project by Stanford University"
- adrianmonk 4y ago> What is PMMoV normalization? > In addition to the pathogens it tests for, WastewaterSCAN measures an extremely common, harmless plant virus that is consumed when people eat. It is called pepper mild mottle virus (or PMMoV). By measuring the concentration of PMMoV genetic markers per dry weight gram of wastewater solids, WastewaterSCAN can account for how much viral material is recovered from each sample and changes to the “fecal strength” of that sample. For example, heavy rain that drains into a wastewater system can dilute the strength of a particular day’s sample. OK, that's pretty clever and it sounds useful, so I guess I should turn on that toggle. But then I read further and see this: > Our analysis suggests that both the concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 genes measured as copies per gram of solid waste and those concentrations normalized by PMMoV are proportional to laboratory confirmed COVID-19 incidence rates in the sewersheds. How can both things be proportional? Do they actually mean positively correlated? If raw data is already proportional to lab tests, then it doesn't seem like there's any benefit from normalizing.
- epistasis 4y agoWastewater analysis is a new and very difficult measurement problem. There's continual discussion of how to do the analysis, and no strong consensus in the field. This is the best part of science: not knowing, but working to discover.
- toxik 4y agoThe strength will mostly be a constant scale factor, hence proportional to.
- hcknwscommenter 4y agoI think a lot is being lost in the translation here. I mean, Verily's analysis is a laboratory *determined* COVID-19 incidence rate in the sewersheds right? How is it any different from the laboratory *confirmed* incidence rate they compare to? As far as proportional, I think you are right. When laboratory confirmed goes up, both Verily concentrations also go up. When laboratory confirmed goes down, both Verily concentrations also go down. I doubt there is a constant scale factor operating here unless the laboratory confirmed is using a similar method of normalization (i.e., they all start with copies per gram dry weight).
- mjevans 4y agoThe post holiday gathering spike is rather obvious. Not just for COVID but for everything. We really should have test kits, and people should test BEFORE travel. A national level policy of full refunds if tested positive (for any illness / disease) could help prevent the needless spread of illness.
- timr 4y ago> The post holiday gathering spike is rather obvious. Not just for COVID but for everything. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It's not a "holiday gathering spike". It's literally the same respiratory pathogen pattern we've seen for as long as we've bothered to look: in the winter, as we go inside and the air becomes cool and dry, respiratory infections go up. The viruses evolved to work this way, because it's a great survival strategy when your host is a social animal that doesn't/can't live outside in the cold. It happens in parts of the world where Christmas and Thanksgiving aren't a thing (see Japan and China and Korea right now). It happens on the opposite schedule in the lower half of the planet (even where Christmas and/or Thanksgiving are a thing). This impulse to blame/scold people for a natural phenomenon is unnerving.
- ampersandy 4y agoWhat about staying inside with cool/dry air causes these infections? Genuinely curious.
- timr 4y agoStaying inside should be obvious by now. These pathogens evolved to exploit the fact that people get together in close quarters and breathe together. Cold/dry air: most respiratory viruses we've looked at survive for longer in cold, dry, dark air.
- version_five 4y agoSorry I don't have a link but I read few years ago that dry air typical of heated indoor spaces in winter means that virus (or maybe virus + moisture we breath out) stay suspended in the air longer
- the_cat_kittles 4y agowastewater seems like such an incredible resource for monitoring so many things. its such a huge statistical sample, for free
- anon_coward_ghk 4y agoIt seems that we are perpetually on the verge of the next big wave, the next scary variant. I am always told by administrators that cases are rising even though I am having trouble finding patients on the floor with covid.