8 ms·
Sewage could reveal true scale of coronavirus outbreak
- darkerside 6y agoI'm sure there are great reasons, but why is it that we can't detect the virus in wastewater at a personal level? Could this be a less invasive way to test for covid19?
- mirimir 6y agoThat'd arguably be less convenient than nasal swabs. But on the other hand, it might be more sensitive for early infections, given that TFA notes: > Studies have also shown that SARS-CoV-2 can appear in faeces within three days of infection, which is much sooner than the time taken for people to develop symptoms severe enough for them to seek hospital care—up to two weeks—and get an official diagnosis, says Tamar Kohn, an environmental virologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Still, that'd be a lot of samples to test.
- vichu 6y agoThere's an Adult Swim short about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ :)
- Waterluvian 6y agoThey just never took the Smartpipe bit to its conclusion. No punchline happened. Broomshakalaka, however, is masterclass.
- amelius 6y agoIt could also look at other markers as a proxy for possible covid infection. If we see that a whole block is getting an unusual amount of sicknesses, we might want to investigate/quarantine that block.
- mirimir 6y agoInteresting. That's also been done for recreational drugs. And artificial vanilla flavoring. I wonder whether sampling from sewage pumping units could be done. That might produce higher resolution data. But getting representative samples would be harder. You'd probably need to take large samples, mix, and subsample.
- skunkworker 6y agoI remember reading something about this about a decade ago maybe in wired or popular science? It was interesting because some organizations didn’t want to know that level of detail, which drugs were being used when, how many students came to school drunk etc. and all by sampling the sewage system regularly
- nradov 6y agoHere's a recent wastewater analysis study showing the prevalence of several illegal drugs in Europe. http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/topics/pods/waste-water-analysis_en http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/topics/pods/waste-water-analysis...
- ddrt 6y ago> This report is focused on illicit stimulants. No results for cannabis are reported because cannabis use is estimated by measuring its main metabolite (THC-COOH), which is the only suitable biomarker found so far, but is excreted in a low percentage. More research is needed to understand the excretion percentage of THC-COOH or find alternative biomarkers (Causanilles et al., 2017a). this is the second sewage testing paper I’ve read today. Why are these so incredibly interesting and fun to read when compared to the other testing documents I’ve read haha.
- kijin 6y agoIt's a kind of hack on modern sanitation systems. It makes you realize that everyone is (literally!) leaking all sorts of information about what's in their bodies. You just need to know where to pick up that treasure trove of information. It tickles the hacker fantasies!
- dontbenebby 6y agoAh yes, the quantified toilets joke from SIGCHI 2014 has come to unironic fruition: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/what-a-toilet-hoax-can-tell-us-about-the-future-of-surveillance/361408/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/what-... It was meant as a prank, not an instruction manual.
- yalogin 6y agoThat is interesting. Do we now what the rate at which the virus dies in water?
- cblades 6y agoYou don't need live viruses, just their RNA.
- kardos 6y ago... so do we know how fast the RNA degrades in sewer conditions?
- marcosdumay 6y agoSlowly enough to not matter. Unless something is degrading it, RNA can last years.
- ddrt 6y agoI’m pretty sure ribonucleases are found everywhere (even in sewage) so if enough are present it would break down all RNA fast. RNases come from skin and dust, for example.
- xkcd-sucks 6y agolol no, rna degrades if you so much as look at it. dna is quite a bit more stable. https://www.bioline.com/rna-hints-and-tips/ https://www.bioline.com/rna-hints-and-tips/
- epmaybe 6y agovery, very fast.
- fludlight 6y agoActual paper: Presence of SARS-Coronavirus-2 in sewage / Medema, et al. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.29.20045880v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.29.20045880v... Check out Table 4.
- viraptor 6y agoSeeing papers like that, I really appreciate what tex did for scientific publishing. (Yes, I understand formatting was not their top concern right now)
- aaron695 6y agoMaybe, equally we have every idiot going to the useless John Hopkins site because it looks pretty. I guess it's an arms game in part.
- pupdogg 6y agoThank you! At least someone understand my frustration. When I try to compare countries, it somehow manages to insert New York along with a few other US states as countries. He/She/They might be a good React/GraphQL ninja(s), but definitely skipped out on the ETL course.
- mhandley 6y agoIs this any more useful as a comparison? http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
- Ruthalas 6y agoWhat's your preferred 'dashboard' for updates?
- pupdogg 6y agohttps://covidnearme.org https://covidnearme.org
- awaythrower 6y agoMaybe. Similar to drug testing an entire city using sewage.
- cameldrv 6y agoI’ve been wondering about this. It would be especially interesting if, after we come out of lockdown, we could sample sewage at many points as the sewer comes together. You might be able for example to identify an infected block and then go around to give individual swabs to each resident if the block came up positive.
- dhash 6y agoThere’s a YC company [0] already doing this. [0] https://www.biobot.io/covid19 https://www.biobot.io/covid19
- sb057 6y agoSTFC19aaS (Sewage Testing for COVID-19 as a Service)
- jerzyt 6y agoWhat a wonderful symmetry to the cholera outbreak in 1854 in London, where John Snow traced the sources to drinking water wells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...
- 8bitsrule 6y agoInteresting that while Snow blamed germs, 'authorities' later blamed 'miasma' instead and ignored Snow. Once again, we learn from history that...
- jerzyt 6y agoThis should also allow to monitor for mutations of the Covid 19, whereas it would be impractical to do at an individual level. It would give an early warning signal.
- jart 6y agoBefore anyone goes collecting sewage samples, consider deriving your scaling factors from discrepencies in ICD-10 diagnostic encoding practices. - Stacked bar chart: https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/1246478379064295425/photo/1 https://twitter.com/OccupyWallSt/status/1246478379064295425/... - Govt data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coronavirus-Disease-C/hc4f-j6nb https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coron... ICD-10 is really the heart of the matter. Earlier recommendations have asked doctors to encode corona death information using Pneumonia (J12.89) or Bronchitis (J20.8, J40) if positive test results are available, suffixed by B97.29 if authorized by the CDC to do so. We now appear to finally have the pneumonia encoded info thanks to NCHS. Hopefully govt will open source the bronchitis encoded reports too. See also: - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/ICD-10-CM-Official-Coding-Gudance-Interim-Advice-coronavirus-feb-20-2020.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/ICD-10-CM-Official-Coding-... - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/ICD-10-CM-April-1-2020-addenda.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/ICD-10-CM-April-1-2020-add... - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final....
- ramraj07 6y agoWhat is the implication here? Is it that the number of pneumonia deaths is the real indication of covids prevalance?
- jart 6y agoWe don't know yet. These numbers are still preliminary, but it helps us to understand better the impact of the workarounds that doctors have needed to use, to tell the CDC it's COVID, when the software does not yet have a button for COVID. The good news from the recent report (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coronavirus-Disease-C/hc4f-j6nb https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-Death-Counts-for-Coron...) is that overall mortality in America these past few months, has actually been lower than previous years. The bad news is that we should prepare for the possibilty that mortality for the new coronavirus specifically could turn out to be much worse than many non-official sources online have speculated, and that what's happening in NYC is happening in a lot more places too. Correcting for software workarounds and verifying good accurate data takes time.
- hkai 6y agoIncidentally, we can also test sewage for drugs and then swat places where people consume drugs. How very helpful. It's just because we need to fight the virus! ️
- potiuper 6y agoExcept in areas without sewer
- thdrdt 6y agoSerious question: are there 'pandemics' we don't hear about because the virus doesn't hurt us? Are those outbreaks also studied?
- tobylane 6y agoIf you mean animal flus that didn’t cross over to humans then certainly. Some of them are in wild animals where we might not casually notice a drop unrelated to our activity, or in farm animals where the heavy use of antibiotics reduces the spread within some farms.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoPublic statement from the Dutch CDC (RIVM) on this method: https://www.rivm.nl/node/153991 https://www.rivm.nl/node/153991
- vivi66 6y agoI saw this is how they define its RNN. Anyone know more context? 0FEC4288E9A0AE55CBD348FD308F000B8D67AD954CA4AA9A21D50542ADDB3239F794790983C7ACC956B5C0C28AFED4902630A2C24800ECAA43EF7BD88A6B531A
- vivi66 6y agoChecking first comment 0FEC4288E9A0AE55CBD348FD308F000B8D67AD954CA4AA9A21D50542ADDB3239F794790983C7ACC956B5C0C28AFED4902630A2C24800ECAA43EF7BD88A6B531A