Mastodawn

I'm struggling with the criticism I'm getting for sharing upbeat #COVID19 news.

For years, I probed data and shared accurate analysis showing COVID risks were higher than most thought. Many people liked and reposted me.

Today, I share that COVID is far lower than it's been in six years after two years of consecutively declining surges, and people act like I'm a COVID minimizer.

Same guy, same data, same analysis. If you welcomed my concern, I hope you'd equally embrace my optimism. 1/2

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Erin Jonaitis 6d ago

@augieray I was under the impression that wastewater data was really only good for near-term comparisons, e.g. “do current levels represent an increase or a drop from last week?” Do we have expert commentary somewhere on whether this has changed? I’d be happy to welcome good news if I could be convinced that we didn’t have to worry about other factors intervening in long range trends (examples off the top of my head — changes in typical viral load in excreta as the virus evolves, changes in wastewater dynamics due to extraneous factors like droughts/floods or engineering updates, changes in how the measurements are taken or reported). I mostly haven’t tracked the data since 2022, so it’s very possible there’s info I’ve missed.

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Augie Ray 6d ago

@emjonaitis there have been studies that have found their wastewater analysis is very predictive of things like infections and hospitalizations. Besides, if short-term wastewater analysis was suggested something as rising or falling then why wouldn't long term analysis do the same?

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Erin Jonaitis

@augieray no, it wouldn’t — some processes can be treated as stationary over short intervals but not long ones. For example, if the measurement is affected by seasonality for some reason (eg a dry/wet seasonal pattern in the local climate), that won’t affect comparisons of measurements week to week, but it will affect long range comparisons. N.B. that example is made up; wastewater data analysis is outside my wheelhouse but I know enough statistics to have a sense of what I don’t know, if that makes sense.

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Eric's Risk Assessment 4d ago

@emjonaitis
I haven't seen any good evidence one way or the other to date.

There has been modelling on wastewater and hospital burden.

I have not seen work looking at the time dependancy & stability of that relationship that I recall.

For example, it may be that different variants change their gut shedding characterisitics which would provide a systematic but time limited bias to waste water results and modelling.

Its an interesting modelling problem.

@augieray