Worse, minimal exposure to prior variants. Like the whole weight of two years will crash over it in a matter of weeks.
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I didnt even mention in my last post, during a full 3 week period in december when calls to Tallahassee about ramping up testing were going ignored, DeSantis was AWOL. Beyond it just being a derlication of duty given the covid situation, the insinuation for the lack of information on his whereabouts was he got sick with covid and felt it would be politically damaging for anyone to know. His comms team eventually provided explanations for his absence (yes, plural), none of which justified the CEO of a state being awol during a crisis. Each explanation was publically criticised, and evidence provided suggesting it was bollocks, only for them to then act indigant that a different reason was the real reason.
Some glamorous work going on in the pandemic. Just heard from a friend involved in modelling the viral signal in the wastewater, trying to determine what the new relationship between community transmission and the ‘poo signal’ is. He is trying to use regression analysis to parse out the old Delta signal (which was similar to previous) from the new Omicron, which is comparatively weaker (we have been so much above any prior case load for weeks now, but poo signal is only now nearing all time high.
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Where? In Boston and NY is was smashing all time records as early as 3-4 weeks ago.
Ottawa.
For comparison, daily cases, with the caveat that for the past 10 days, testing has decoupled - most people cannot get access to PCR testing, so the real rate is significantly higher what is already the all-time high
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In fact, since early December, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has had to quintuple the y-axis on their chart to capture the exponential spike, which now dwarfs the previous surges in the spring of 2020 and last winter.
Sample image
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Very odd. It beggars belief that in April the Ottawa area would have been capturing a smaller percentage of infections with testing capacity at peak and no restrictions versus the current conditions. I had assumed there might be some sort of shifted relationship due to Omicron occurring higher up in the airway.
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Yeah, it’s really surprising. I saw another one a few weeks ago and the adjustment made to the Y axis to capture the current rates smoothed out the previous peaks so much that you couldnt really identify any prior waves.
For cases, it is now much harder to pick out much of the older variance, the high until December was just over 400 and the graph was drawn with 450 as the extreme value. The March-April 2020 doesn’t look much bigger than the bump in Fall 2021.
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What a shit job
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of course at the start of Omicron wave here the wastewater testing is offline over two weeks from Mid Dec to first week of Jan.
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With the recent flooding, I think the baseline would be a mess anyway, the signal would really be difficult to interpret.
wastewater and stormwater are two different systems here boss. we live in a temperate rainforest, combining the two would be disastrous.
There must be a pressure link between the two with high water though, and almost certainly some overflows. This area has two separate systems, but extreme events force convergence. That link notes that stormwater can enter the wastewater system, I presume in a flooding event that is quite likely.
The funny thing is that they aren’t flying home - return flight cancelled because they did not undertake to follow the rules.
The opposite would not likely happen, as wastewater entering storm water would cause all sorts of health issues
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Entirely possible. Question is whether it’s deliberate or not I guess.
Flood water or a surge would certainly dilute the figures but surely they could account for that simply on the basis that, to my knowledge people don’t shit more when it rains. They must know their base flow rates. Perhaps the difficulty is getting a worthwhile sample in those conditions but again I struggle a bit to see why given they are on a separate foul and surface water system
EDIT: I am a dumb ass. If there is flooding, actual standing water then its obvious that surface water will enter the foul system. Still difficult to appreciate the difficulty in how they can get useful sampling and interpret the results.
As my friend in Toronto said, they’re not Canadian, they’re Quebecoise
So, they’re French then.