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KerPop42 t1_j26zbtw wrote

Oh, that's actually a pretty good metric. We should also be testing city wastewater

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OptimusSublime t1_j2717r8 wrote

They do test city wastewater. That's how we have a general ballpark of how widespread certain viruses are.

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sawyouoverthere t1_j27d6r2 wrote

Many places do. You may have seen it discussed recently around the polio cases in NYC and London (iirc on locations).

It's a really good way to get an overview of what is circulating in the population, without needing personal identifiers or individual collectons, and gives a bit of advance indication, since many diseases begin to show up in wastewater before they appear in drs offices etc where they are documented.

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michimac t1_j29300z wrote

Our wastewater system was one of the earliest systems to have covid testing. We get weekly reports of detected levels.

There are some HUGE problems with using these numbers to make predictions. For example, every system has a different level of groundwater infiltration. This dilutes the waste stream and will result in lower numbers when compared similar systems with less infiltration. Another issue is the length of time the wastewater spends traveling through the system. This varies wildly from system to system.

Wastewater covid testing, at this point, is nothing more than pure research. It is interesting data, and will be valuable some day, but for now, the value is very limited.

Testing on an airline is a far more controlled setting and values are more easily compared to each other.

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