I was more inclined to think that trying to distinguish variants via sewage is intrinsically flawed, since the Omicron "swarm" for an entire city could have some 157del mutants or otherwise just prompt false-positive. But their previous studies show stark transitions using dels to distinguish Alpha and Delta. Which potentially means the high cycle count isn't as big a flaw either.
RE the model, the math just seems stupid. Delta is staying level until the end. So the model concludes it has to just keep staying level forever, because (as far as I can make out) their equation concludes it will never go high enough to make enough people immune (even though there's tons of prior immunity to Delta). Ok, so your model is idiotic, fix it.
Thanks for this post. I had a few reservations about that article, as people were far too quick to extrapolate the data to say that this is all because of the vaccinated. The test really just tested for genes in the water, and that's really mostly what we can conclude- it's just present. I commented that if they really wanted to see how much Delta is active then they would do genomic sequencing rather than rt-PCR. I did mention that the difference in tropism may mean that someone could be coinfected, but your idea that different populations may be infected and the wastewater collecting together could be viable.
Dr. Vanden Bossche is an interesting character. I'm halfway through his interview on The Highwire, and I think there are some alarming aspects to his assessment. I think we're seeing that many people are steadfast in their ideas or assumptions that they may not want to be able to examine different perspectives if it may undermine their own ideas.
as they say in software development: shit in, shit out. bwaahahahahahaha
I was more inclined to think that trying to distinguish variants via sewage is intrinsically flawed, since the Omicron "swarm" for an entire city could have some 157del mutants or otherwise just prompt false-positive. But their previous studies show stark transitions using dels to distinguish Alpha and Delta. Which potentially means the high cycle count isn't as big a flaw either.
RE the model, the math just seems stupid. Delta is staying level until the end. So the model concludes it has to just keep staying level forever, because (as far as I can make out) their equation concludes it will never go high enough to make enough people immune (even though there's tons of prior immunity to Delta). Ok, so your model is idiotic, fix it.
Thanks for this post. I had a few reservations about that article, as people were far too quick to extrapolate the data to say that this is all because of the vaccinated. The test really just tested for genes in the water, and that's really mostly what we can conclude- it's just present. I commented that if they really wanted to see how much Delta is active then they would do genomic sequencing rather than rt-PCR. I did mention that the difference in tropism may mean that someone could be coinfected, but your idea that different populations may be infected and the wastewater collecting together could be viable.
Dr. Vanden Bossche is an interesting character. I'm halfway through his interview on The Highwire, and I think there are some alarming aspects to his assessment. I think we're seeing that many people are steadfast in their ideas or assumptions that they may not want to be able to examine different perspectives if it may undermine their own ideas.