Perhaps Macron will hassle them then? Or whatever the translation should be…
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As an example, there is a storm sewer system on the street in front of my house, including an open steel grate that the surface water from the road enters. Our perimeter drains from our house flow into that system, catchment from our roof downspouts and such.
The wastewater lines from inside the house flow through a different set of pipes into the sewage system which eventually is pumped to the treatment plants where they take samples. There is a cleanout access point at the corner of my property line which the city has to maintain, anything inside of that is my responsibility. That cleanout is where my neighbors sewage line and mine meet at a junction with the city’s
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What if you’re coming home drunk and piss down the wrong grate? Seems that system wasnt very well thought through.
Pretty standard set up there by the sounds of things.
The issue is of course that in a flood water will find its way in via any covers, or other access points to the system.
Sadly in the UK many areas run on a combined foul surface water system. There are also extensive maintenance issues, old stock issues and capacity. Joys of private ownership and a poor contract set up in many areas sadly.
Haha, this thread is teetering on full geek. Came here to read virus news and am slowly becoming an expert on wastewater!
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Yes, same with our system except in the most extreme case - hasn’t ever happened. But for the poo signal, the massive dilution caused by the storm->waste flow would be really disruptive.
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Snow on the ground in Vancouver?!?
Well we reckon the couple across the street have a bit of kink to them, so would get a free view if I ever decided to drop trouser in the middle of our street
@Arminius it’s snowing again now. Have had 4-6" of snow on the ground for a few weeks now. Fortunately the flooding subsided before it hit -16°C last week and broke record. Freezing rain yesterday had my car doors stuck closed. All sorts of cool stuff out here this year. 2022 off to a flyer
Wild - I knew there had been some snow, but did not realize it had stuck for long. You have more than we do here, too cold to snow (-22 when I went out this am). Sort of contributes to the faux lockdown feel.
Have a read. Having seen who the authors of this piece are, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re nearing the end of this.
Thoughts?
Broadly speaking, I think most governments will be there not too long from now. The Omicron wave is just so enormous that by March, very few people will not have been exposed to it - it could even simply run out of potential hosts, perhaps not even reaching an endemic state. South Africa was perversely well positioned to emerge quickly, because of how high pre-Omicron exposure was, other places will have to manage through the wave somewhat more carefully. But there is little question in mind that Omicron is a pre- and post- sort of dividing line.
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Always know your shit
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But isn’t this based on the notion that once you’ve had it you can’t get it again? I thought that had been put to bed?
Thinking in binary terms is not helpful. The endemic end goal is an immune response that can respond well enough that being exposed to it is rarely a big deal. With a lot of questions still unanswered about the longevity of our immunity and the likelihood of further variants, there is obviously still a lot of unknowns and potential for that end game to not be possible.
However, on the positive side, think of our immune response as like teaching a kid. The first time you explain something to them they’ve never encountered before they might get 50% of it, but you need repetition and often to present the information to them in multiple different ways for them to really get. So, with each new exposure we’ll get better at protecting ourselves against the next one, and this is especially true if there is variability in what we’re responding to (virus vs vaccination, original strain vs omicron, mRNA vaccine vs protein vaccine).
That does provide us a path to an endemic like end-game (unlikely to really be endemic in the true sense, but as in the way people are using the term to mean something we are now used to), but it’s still completely up in the air as to how this will all play out.
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Not really, merely on the idea that you can’t (or at least are very, very unlikely) to get it again while you have active antibodies. When we had waves rolling around the world in timeframes of 4-5 months, the virus always has somewhere to go. Omicron is just so fast that virtually the entire population might have active antibodies by March. The same terrrifying math that has produced near vertical growth operates on the slope down. I did a model in the last week of November for Ontario, and predicted a peak on January 10 - assumptions were R of 4.5, Incubation 4.5 days, Infectious period of 3.3 days 2% hospitalization, 0.1% fatality. More or less middle of the road of what the South Africans were saying. A single index case on November 11 (that was based on the fact it was in extensive community transmission by November 25 in Kingston, Ontario)
The model peaks at Day 60 with 4.6 million people exposed, 3.2 million active cases. By day 70, there are only about 500k people left who have never been exposed. By Day 100, there are only 8.5k active cases, and new cases are approaching zero. Sounds great, but along the way 35,000 of us will have died.
That model broadly agrees with the one the Science Table presented on December 16, but their model assumed intervention on that day to reduce R, and they didn’t present what January looked like to the public. Intervention didn’t really happen until January 3, basically too late to really alter the shape significantly, so thanks to our idiot provincial government, my assumptions ended up being closer than the Science Table’s.
So, my approach has basically been to get through January.
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5 largest European countries (excluding Russia) since 1 March last year, in order of deaths/million.
Italy
4,345,222 cases. 40,932 deaths. 679 deaths/m.
France
8,290,365 cases. 38,458 deaths. 587 deaths/m.
Germany
5,038,757 cases. 43,472 deaths. 516 deaths/m.
Spain
4,042,027 cases. 20,325 deaths. 434 deaths/m.
UK
10,165,155 cases. 26,896 deaths. 393 deaths/m.
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Meanwhile, the UK passed a grim milestone today.
God knows how anyone can suggest our Government has done a decent job managing this.
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Just think of all the carbon being emitted to heat your homes ;). And cool them in summer. We should all just live in France 