13 ms·

Ohio cryptic lineage update

161 points by ano-ther 3y ago

jollyllama 3y ago
And yet if this guy said "They're trying to track me through my waste in the sewers" they'd lock him up
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  They don't lock people up for being crazy anymore. They might put you in a psych ward for 72 hours and give you sedatives, but that's it.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    ...what do you define locking up to be, if not exactly that?
    - cjohnson318 3y ago
      When people use the term "locked up", they aren't referring to a long weekend, they're referring to a sentence that lasts at least several months.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        If you confine me against my will for any overnight, I’d certainly describe that as “locked up”. I think I’m in the majority in that.
        cjohnson318 3y ago
        That's fine, but if you're put in the drunk tank overnight, and then refer to that as having been "locked up", then people will reasonably assume that you had spent several months or years in jail. In context: Elizabeth Holmes has been locked up, while Anderson Lee Aldritch had a string of mental health evaluations before going on to commit mass murder.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    72 hours is a minimum incarceration. Any so-called professional expert can freely extend that at will.
    - cjohnson318 3y ago
      > Any so-called professional expert can freely extend that at will. I don't believe that is accurate, but I am open to changing my mind with more details. In most states, an involuntary psychiatric commitment cannot extend beyond 72 hours without a formal hearing. This 3-day period allows patients to receive basic medical treatment, recover from psychotic episodes, and hopefully understand the need for further help. The patient has the option of remaining voluntarily under care or committing to receiving continued outpatient treatment. Nevertheless, after the first 72 hours have passed, the patient can decline to comply with any further medical treatment.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        "Formal hearings" are a technicality. Many hospitals now have courtrooms built into them, so the doctors don't have to go anywhere. You don't attend your hearing or receive any notification of it. Court petitions go right from the doctor to the judge to the hospital and you're in for it. It's their professional, expert opinion vs. the ravings of an ignorant crazy person in crisis. You're guilty until proven innocent, and good luck finding attorneys who are into that kind of thing. The longer you've been in the system and on their radar, the more likely you'll have a track record for them to dig up and show as evidence. Saying you can't be held without a formal hearing is like saying the police can't search you without a warrant. Completely and irrefutably true by the letter of the law. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to "decline compliance" with psychiatric treatment, but that will also go on your record every time, and sooner or later there will be a solid case built to court-order your "treatment", because you're just so bothersome to the system.
        cjohnson318 3y ago
        It's my understanding, through talking with heath professionals, that people typically come into the psych ward after having an interaction with police, and then they're let go after 72 hours. I know others that have admitted themselves, and then left after 72 hours. A lot has changed since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; hospital administrators have almost zero interest in keeping people any longer than they have to, since many people do not have health insurance, and sometimes present a risk to hospital staff. We have no legal way of forcibly removing people from society, for their own safety and the safety of others, until they have an interaction with police, or commit an actual crime, and then they go to jail.
- juve1996 3y ago
  Maybe but also think about all the lucrative podcast appearances he could have.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andrewstuart 3y ago
What is this? They e found a highly infectious person via wastewater and want to identify them?
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Highly infectious and with an unusual strain. Not sure how they can confirm that it’s just 1 person infected vs. a group. But with common or typical strains, it wouldn’t be easy to determine if you have a few highly shedding individuals or a lot of lightly shedding ones. That’s one issue with wastewater sampling for infectious diseases, versus what the technique was developed for: detecting pharma/recreational drug use in a population.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    that was what I thought of: I know people have worked on detecting community meth or heroin or other drugs through the wastewater. I don't know how much that's being done, though.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      more than twenty years ago (?) discarded pharma materials in the public wastewater, was identified as a serious environmental problem.. There was a public relations campaign funded at that time.. well-before the Sackler-era
  - maxsilver 3y ago
    > Not sure how they can confirm that it’s just 1 person infected vs. a group. They've explained it before -- https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362?s=20 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362... -- while they aren't confirming it's exactly one person, they've got strong data to suggest it's likely just one person, and for sure not some kind of community outbreak situation.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
mmastrac 3y ago
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/mysterious-covid-strain-found-in-central-ohio/ https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/mysterious-co... COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Viral researchers believe someone in central Ohio has been infected with COVID-19 for at least two years, and they want to find that person. While the researchers believe there is no threat to public health, they hope this case holds much-needed answers to treating long COVID. [...] Johnson stressed that this is not a threat to public health, explaining that the virus is inactive once it passes through the gastrointestinal tract. A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Health said health officials are not fully convinced that the cryptic strain is linked to only one person, but they are not investigating it because it poses no threat to public health.
- rollulus 3y ago
  Thank you. I found the thread and title very… cryptic.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  > explaining that the virus is inactive once it passes through the gastrointestinal tract. How do they know that only the gastrointestinal tract is infected in this person?
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Because, presumably, it otherwise would have spread and could not have been isolated in this way.
  - ssnistfajen 3y ago
    The variant doesn't seem to be spreading in the community.
- adastra22 3y ago
  > While the researchers believe there is no threat to public health How can they possibly know this? This person has a novel COVID strain that could be more or less virulent--we just have no way of knowing.
cypherpunks01 3y ago
Wastewater surveillance is definitely highly useful and well-intended, but this brings up some troubling questions. The obvious one being: To what extent could an arbitrary (non-infected) person's general whereabouts be tracked through municipal wastewater surveillance, given a large amount of resources?
- perihelions 3y ago
  Yes. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatch-our-dna-shows-up-in-environmental-samples/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatc... ("We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies")
- sneak 3y ago
  Much easier to track them via their smartphone, which already gives approximate location, and which is already collected in bulk by carriers and accessible 24/7 without a warrant by federal spies. They also have all the historical data so even if your phone is off or not with you they can estimate with a high degree of probability which city you are in at a given time.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  If there were real time DNA sensors in every toilet, yeah, you could track everybody. But most sampling techniques don't offer that precision.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Well, we've got a good start with cameras installed in the vast majority of commercial toilets and urinals. It's not a huge leap to do more.
- ravi-delia 3y ago
  Essentially not at all, unless they have a weird enough mutation that they produce some protein unique to them. They're tracking this person because the only thing they know about them is the strain of covid they have. If you have a target in mind, literally any other method would be better than getting close enough to sample their shit and then running away and only tracking them on a long delay.
londons_explore 3y ago
> COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Viral researchers believe someone in central Ohio has been infected with COVID-19 for at least two years, and they want to find that person. I believe this is why various lockdown strategies didn't work to eliminate COVID, even in very authoritarian places which can effectively enforce the lockdowns. All it takes is one person to have a persistent 'forever infection' like this, and you will never eliminate the disease from your country. Even if you lock down with no person to person contact for months, as soon as you end the lockdown the disease will appear. The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.
- perihelions 3y ago
  [vouch] Why even was this flagged? It's a perfectly good curious comment. - "The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life," Not a hypothetical. That was the initial reaction of several countries to HIV/AIDS, and Cuba actually implemented it [0]. [0] https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/11/29/are-public-health-quarantines-in-our-future-column/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/11/29/are-public-healt...
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I'm always amazed at the diversity of opinions about lockdowns. In this case, I'm flabbergasted anyone ever thought that lockdowns alone would eliminate the disease, or that elimination was the goal of lockdowns. Are either of these common beliefs? Let alone that that lockdowns + prison + tracking those with persistent infections was the next logical step in the case of TFA
  - RandallBrown 3y ago
    I was unaware that forever infections existed. I was definitely of the opinion that if we all locked down for 2 weeks and made no contact with anyone, this would all go away because the disease would be dead. I of course also realized that it's impossible for everyone to actually be locked down with no contact.
jrnichols 3y ago
This whole time we've been told that this is totally anonymous. Now we are seeing that it can most definitely be used to track people. Interesting.
- 1024core 3y ago
  Please read the thread. They're not tracking a particular individual; if they were capable of doing that, they would have reached out to the individual and there wouldn't be a thread at all. The hypothesis is that it's the same individual, based on the fact that the virus samples are drifting together. From another tweet by the same author https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1666411725527171072 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1666411725527171072 : The lineage in just two sewersheds. The sequence drifts over time, but the sequence in the two sewersheds drift together. If it were multiple people the sequence would form distinct branches. We don't have proof it's one person, but it is the most likely explanation.
  - jrnichols 3y ago
    I did read the thread and I understand it. The fact that they were able to narrow it down to one building with only 30 people means that it is definitely not many would consider to be anonymous. From a news article in the thread: “We started tracking it,” Johnson said. “So, we started from the main treatment plant of over 100,000 people, and sort of like checked all the lines. And all of them, only one of the lines had the lineage. And so we would just keep going — checking… all of the pieces of the web, figuring out– following it up, up the line until we got to a single manhole. That manhole actually only got waste from one place, which was a company (that) had about 30 employees.” my point is valid. They are able to do quite a bit of tracking through wastewater. That removes most of the anonymity. The twitter user you linked to seems to agree. https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665525245451665408 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665525245451665408
- tantalor 3y ago
  The subject here is anonymous.
EMCymatics 3y ago
https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362 This tweet alone could probably dox someone.
- jedberg 3y ago
  OP addresses both the points further down thread -- Washington Courthouse is a city, not a building. 1600 people a day make that commute.
- plegresl 3y ago
  https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665752607233826817 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665752607233826817 "Washington Court House is a town of 15k (not an actual courthouse)."
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
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m4xm4n 3y ago
brb writing a dystopian fiction where members of the criminal underworld pee in bottles and do... other things... to evade the state. and then there's a sherlock-type investigator who's chasing a character through the sewers, etc.
- perihelions 3y ago
  Without spoilers: that was a major plot point in Gattaca (1997).
- whinenot 3y ago
  Putin already does this.[0]. He doesn't want adversaries to know what drugs he's taking (presumably for cancer). [0]https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade-rumeur-ou-tumeur-1810897 https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade...
  - dendrite9 3y ago
    There may have learned a lesson from Stalin. "According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces. The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools. In other words, espionage via excrement." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926
    - netsharc 3y ago
      I remember saying that the Secret Service has a sophisticated portable toilet for the president to use when he's travelling, but the only source I could find was some conspiracy website. (I found it during the Bush II administration, so it's either gone from the Internet, or Google has probably lost it)
- reureu 3y ago
  You'd enjoy "Urinetown: The Musical"
- 3y ago
bnprks 3y ago
Should this title be updated to "Tracking a single person through wastewater viral RNA"? The SARS-CoV-2 genome is RNA [1], and this is presumably what's being measured by this virology researcher. The tweets don't specify DNA or RNA, but from context it seems they are tracking the viral RNA. This also removes some of the spooky surveillance overtones, since the genetic material being tracked originates from a virus, not a human genome. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293463/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293463/
- dang 3y ago
  OK, I've changed the title to that above, at least until someone suggests a better one. Edit: on second thought, probably the original title is better (in keeping with the site guidelines). Better to let the comments hash out what it actually means.
throwaway5752 3y ago
What an amazing thing this is. They can tell from genomic analysis in sewage that, out of a 10k-20k population, an individual has a novel, persistent viral infection.
api 3y ago
Yet another “we live in a cyberpunk novel” link…
mparnisari 3y ago
This is fascinating. Are there other cities doing sewage analysis like this?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nlewycky 3y ago
  If you mean analysing sewage for COVID-19, then yes. I've been monitoring COVID levels in my community via https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater .
- quadrifoliate 3y ago
  Yes, all across the world: https://www.covid19wbec.org/covidpoops19 https://www.covid19wbec.org/covidpoops19
jefftk 3y ago
They estimate the person is shedding ~2e12 genomes daily [1]. If this person were in Boston, one of ~3M people shedding into Deer Island sewershed, then their stool would be diluted with an average of 4e8 gal/d [2] from other people. This would give an average of 5e3 (2e12/4e8) copies from this person in every gallon of sewage going through the plant, or ~2 copies per mL of sewage. That's about 1% of what biobot finds in a typical mL of sewage these days. [3] Which is good news, really. Before I did the calculation I was worried that a single highly-infected person might be enough to skew the numbers all by themselves even in a large city. On the other hand, in a sewershed of 15k instead of 3M, this person's contribution would be enough to 4x the measured concentration. [1] https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444608921223169 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444608921223169 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatment_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatm... [3] https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
qbasic_forever 3y ago
I think he has it backwards where this person lives and commutes. I spent 15 years living in Columbus and the idea that you would live in the very heart of the city and commute out to Washington Courthouse, a very small drive-by town (population of only 14k people!) in the huge rural expanse outside Columbus, is kind of bonkers. Columbus cost of living (especially in the heart of it) is much, much higher than WC so you'd be spending tons of money and commuting a couple hours a day for no good reason. I suspect this person lives in WC and works in downtown Columbus, like at Nationwide Insurance or one of other big corporate employers there, or perhaps they even work at the statehouse for the state government located there. They're probably doing their business in the office every day since they're spending most waking hours there during the week (and naturally get into a regular schedule). This would make a LOT more sense as the cost to live outside Columbus is significantly cheaper while commuting in isn't that bad (there are tons of highways all around and into the city). Perhaps this person even works a lower wage or benefit service job there and has no real healthcare benefits, paid time off, etc. to help them take care of health issues they might be suffering from a persistent COVID infection--more reason why they'd be living in a cheap town on the outskirts of the city and commuting in to their job downtown.
- IanCal 3y ago
  I think it's because it's seen always at he city and only sometimes at the town. You'd generally expect to see it primarily where you live. However, the person may have a strong preference for poopin' on the clock.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - atdrummond 3y ago
    Funny you mention that - I dated a woman for three years who never once went to the bathroom (#2) at her house or mine. This wasn’t an objective of her’s; rather, she had such a precise internal clock that she went regularly a few minutes past ten every day. On the weekends, this meant she went at the gym on Saturday and at the church on Sunday. I didn’t think much of it at the time but realized years later that it was quite an incredibly odd streak she had built up.
lamontcg 3y ago
> If you do get a positive reading, I would suggest having someone else try with the same kind of test with their feces to be sure it isn’t a false positive. Weird shit happens. well played.
IanCal 3y ago
I'm a bit worried about this. Sometimes people on the internet get a bit... intense about solving a thing and finding someone. They don't always get it right either.
perihelions 3y ago
- "As academically interesting that this is, I think there are SERIOUS privacy concerns you're flirting with." - "Yeah, it gets complicated." It doesn't look complicated to me at all — you just want reputation points with your professional peers, and to hell with the patient. This internet-mob victim has been completely doxxed to the general public: {place of work; place of residence; chronically immunocompromised (probably)}. That's an N=1 almost certainly.

161 points by ano-ther 3y ago

jollyllama 3y ago

And yet if this guy said "They're trying to track me through my waste in the sewers" they'd lock him up

cjohnson318 3y ago
They don't lock people up for being crazy anymore. They might put you in a psych ward for 72 hours and give you sedatives, but that's it.
- adastra22 3y ago
  ...what do you define locking up to be, if not exactly that?
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    When people use the term "locked up", they aren't referring to a long weekend, they're referring to a sentence that lasts at least several months.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      If you confine me against my will for any overnight, I’d certainly describe that as “locked up”. I think I’m in the majority in that.
      - cjohnson318 3y ago
        That's fine, but if you're put in the drunk tank overnight, and then refer to that as having been "locked up", then people will reasonably assume that you had spent several months or years in jail. In context: Elizabeth Holmes has been locked up, while Anderson Lee Aldritch had a string of mental health evaluations before going on to commit mass murder.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  72 hours is a minimum incarceration. Any so-called professional expert can freely extend that at will.
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    > Any so-called professional expert can freely extend that at will. I don't believe that is accurate, but I am open to changing my mind with more details. In most states, an involuntary psychiatric commitment cannot extend beyond 72 hours without a formal hearing. This 3-day period allows patients to receive basic medical treatment, recover from psychotic episodes, and hopefully understand the need for further help. The patient has the option of remaining voluntarily under care or committing to receiving continued outpatient treatment. Nevertheless, after the first 72 hours have passed, the patient can decline to comply with any further medical treatment.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      "Formal hearings" are a technicality. Many hospitals now have courtrooms built into them, so the doctors don't have to go anywhere. You don't attend your hearing or receive any notification of it. Court petitions go right from the doctor to the judge to the hospital and you're in for it. It's their professional, expert opinion vs. the ravings of an ignorant crazy person in crisis. You're guilty until proven innocent, and good luck finding attorneys who are into that kind of thing. The longer you've been in the system and on their radar, the more likely you'll have a track record for them to dig up and show as evidence. Saying you can't be held without a formal hearing is like saying the police can't search you without a warrant. Completely and irrefutably true by the letter of the law. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to "decline compliance" with psychiatric treatment, but that will also go on your record every time, and sooner or later there will be a solid case built to court-order your "treatment", because you're just so bothersome to the system.
      - cjohnson318 3y ago
        It's my understanding, through talking with heath professionals, that people typically come into the psych ward after having an interaction with police, and then they're let go after 72 hours. I know others that have admitted themselves, and then left after 72 hours. A lot has changed since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; hospital administrators have almost zero interest in keeping people any longer than they have to, since many people do not have health insurance, and sometimes present a risk to hospital staff. We have no legal way of forcibly removing people from society, for their own safety and the safety of others, until they have an interaction with police, or commit an actual crime, and then they go to jail.
juve1996 3y ago
Maybe but also think about all the lucrative podcast appearances he could have.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andrewstuart 3y ago

What is this? They e found a highly infectious person via wastewater and want to identify them?

Scoundreller 3y ago
Highly infectious and with an unusual strain. Not sure how they can confirm that it’s just 1 person infected vs. a group. But with common or typical strains, it wouldn’t be easy to determine if you have a few highly shedding individuals or a lot of lightly shedding ones. That’s one issue with wastewater sampling for infectious diseases, versus what the technique was developed for: detecting pharma/recreational drug use in a population.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  that was what I thought of: I know people have worked on detecting community meth or heroin or other drugs through the wastewater. I don't know how much that's being done, though.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    more than twenty years ago (?) discarded pharma materials in the public wastewater, was identified as a serious environmental problem.. There was a public relations campaign funded at that time.. well-before the Sackler-era
- maxsilver 3y ago
  > Not sure how they can confirm that it’s just 1 person infected vs. a group. They've explained it before -- https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362?s=20 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362... -- while they aren't confirming it's exactly one person, they've got strong data to suggest it's likely just one person, and for sure not some kind of community outbreak situation.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago

mmastrac 3y ago

https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/mysterious-covid-strain-found-in-central-ohio/ https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/mysterious-co... COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Viral researchers believe someone in central Ohio has been infected with COVID-19 for at least two years, and they want to find that person. While the researchers believe there is no threat to public health, they hope this case holds much-needed answers to treating long COVID. [...] Johnson stressed that this is not a threat to public health, explaining that the virus is inactive once it passes through the gastrointestinal tract. A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Health said health officials are not fully convinced that the cryptic strain is linked to only one person, but they are not investigating it because it poses no threat to public health.

rollulus 3y ago
Thank you. I found the thread and title very… cryptic.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
> explaining that the virus is inactive once it passes through the gastrointestinal tract. How do they know that only the gastrointestinal tract is infected in this person?
- adastra22 3y ago
  Because, presumably, it otherwise would have spread and could not have been isolated in this way.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  The variant doesn't seem to be spreading in the community.
adastra22 3y ago
> While the researchers believe there is no threat to public health How can they possibly know this? This person has a novel COVID strain that could be more or less virulent--we just have no way of knowing.

cypherpunks01 3y ago

Wastewater surveillance is definitely highly useful and well-intended, but this brings up some troubling questions. The obvious one being: To what extent could an arbitrary (non-infected) person's general whereabouts be tracked through municipal wastewater surveillance, given a large amount of resources?

perihelions 3y ago
Yes. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatch-our-dna-shows-up-in-environmental-samples/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatc... ("We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies")
sneak 3y ago
Much easier to track them via their smartphone, which already gives approximate location, and which is already collected in bulk by carriers and accessible 24/7 without a warrant by federal spies. They also have all the historical data so even if your phone is off or not with you they can estimate with a high degree of probability which city you are in at a given time.
tedunangst 3y ago
If there were real time DNA sensors in every toilet, yeah, you could track everybody. But most sampling techniques don't offer that precision.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Well, we've got a good start with cameras installed in the vast majority of commercial toilets and urinals. It's not a huge leap to do more.
ravi-delia 3y ago
Essentially not at all, unless they have a weird enough mutation that they produce some protein unique to them. They're tracking this person because the only thing they know about them is the strain of covid they have. If you have a target in mind, literally any other method would be better than getting close enough to sample their shit and then running away and only tracking them on a long delay.

londons_explore 3y ago

> COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Viral researchers believe someone in central Ohio has been infected with COVID-19 for at least two years, and they want to find that person. I believe this is why various lockdown strategies didn't work to eliminate COVID, even in very authoritarian places which can effectively enforce the lockdowns. All it takes is one person to have a persistent 'forever infection' like this, and you will never eliminate the disease from your country. Even if you lock down with no person to person contact for months, as soon as you end the lockdown the disease will appear. The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.

perihelions 3y ago
[vouch] Why even was this flagged? It's a perfectly good curious comment. - "The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life," Not a hypothetical. That was the initial reaction of several countries to HIV/AIDS, and Cuba actually implemented it [0]. [0] https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/11/29/are-public-health-quarantines-in-our-future-column/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/11/29/are-public-healt...
jvanderbot 3y ago
I'm always amazed at the diversity of opinions about lockdowns. In this case, I'm flabbergasted anyone ever thought that lockdowns alone would eliminate the disease, or that elimination was the goal of lockdowns. Are either of these common beliefs? Let alone that that lockdowns + prison + tracking those with persistent infections was the next logical step in the case of TFA
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  I was unaware that forever infections existed. I was definitely of the opinion that if we all locked down for 2 weeks and made no contact with anyone, this would all go away because the disease would be dead. I of course also realized that it's impossible for everyone to actually be locked down with no contact.

jrnichols 3y ago

This whole time we've been told that this is totally anonymous. Now we are seeing that it can most definitely be used to track people. Interesting.

1024core 3y ago
Please read the thread. They're not tracking a particular individual; if they were capable of doing that, they would have reached out to the individual and there wouldn't be a thread at all. The hypothesis is that it's the same individual, based on the fact that the virus samples are drifting together. From another tweet by the same author https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1666411725527171072 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1666411725527171072 : The lineage in just two sewersheds. The sequence drifts over time, but the sequence in the two sewersheds drift together. If it were multiple people the sequence would form distinct branches. We don't have proof it's one person, but it is the most likely explanation.
- jrnichols 3y ago
  I did read the thread and I understand it. The fact that they were able to narrow it down to one building with only 30 people means that it is definitely not many would consider to be anonymous. From a news article in the thread: “We started tracking it,” Johnson said. “So, we started from the main treatment plant of over 100,000 people, and sort of like checked all the lines. And all of them, only one of the lines had the lineage. And so we would just keep going — checking… all of the pieces of the web, figuring out– following it up, up the line until we got to a single manhole. That manhole actually only got waste from one place, which was a company (that) had about 30 employees.” my point is valid. They are able to do quite a bit of tracking through wastewater. That removes most of the anonymity. The twitter user you linked to seems to agree. https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665525245451665408 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665525245451665408
tantalor 3y ago
The subject here is anonymous.

EMCymatics 3y ago

https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362 This tweet alone could probably dox someone.

jedberg 3y ago
OP addresses both the points further down thread -- Washington Courthouse is a city, not a building. 1600 people a day make that commute.
plegresl 3y ago
https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665752607233826817 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665752607233826817 "Washington Court House is a town of 15k (not an actual courthouse)."
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m4xm4n 3y ago

brb writing a dystopian fiction where members of the criminal underworld pee in bottles and do... other things... to evade the state. and then there's a sherlock-type investigator who's chasing a character through the sewers, etc.

perihelions 3y ago
Without spoilers: that was a major plot point in Gattaca (1997).
whinenot 3y ago
Putin already does this.[0]. He doesn't want adversaries to know what drugs he's taking (presumably for cancer). [0]https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade-rumeur-ou-tumeur-1810897 https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade...
- dendrite9 3y ago
  There may have learned a lesson from Stalin. "According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces. The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools. In other words, espionage via excrement." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926
  - netsharc 3y ago
    I remember saying that the Secret Service has a sophisticated portable toilet for the president to use when he's travelling, but the only source I could find was some conspiracy website. (I found it during the Bush II administration, so it's either gone from the Internet, or Google has probably lost it)
reureu 3y ago
You'd enjoy "Urinetown: The Musical"
3y ago

bnprks 3y ago

Should this title be updated to "Tracking a single person through wastewater viral RNA"? The SARS-CoV-2 genome is RNA [1], and this is presumably what's being measured by this virology researcher. The tweets don't specify DNA or RNA, but from context it seems they are tracking the viral RNA. This also removes some of the spooky surveillance overtones, since the genetic material being tracked originates from a virus, not a human genome. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293463/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293463/

dang 3y ago
OK, I've changed the title to that above, at least until someone suggests a better one. Edit: on second thought, probably the original title is better (in keeping with the site guidelines). Better to let the comments hash out what it actually means.

throwaway5752 3y ago

What an amazing thing this is. They can tell from genomic analysis in sewage that, out of a 10k-20k population, an individual has a novel, persistent viral infection.

api 3y ago

Yet another “we live in a cyberpunk novel” link…

mparnisari 3y ago

This is fascinating. Are there other cities doing sewage analysis like this?

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nlewycky 3y ago
If you mean analysing sewage for COVID-19, then yes. I've been monitoring COVID levels in my community via https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater .
quadrifoliate 3y ago
Yes, all across the world: https://www.covid19wbec.org/covidpoops19 https://www.covid19wbec.org/covidpoops19

jefftk 3y ago

They estimate the person is shedding ~2e12 genomes daily [1]. If this person were in Boston, one of ~3M people shedding into Deer Island sewershed, then their stool would be diluted with an average of 4e8 gal/d [2] from other people. This would give an average of 5e3 (2e12/4e8) copies from this person in every gallon of sewage going through the plant, or ~2 copies per mL of sewage. That's about 1% of what biobot finds in a typical mL of sewage these days. [3] Which is good news, really. Before I did the calculation I was worried that a single highly-infected person might be enough to skew the numbers all by themselves even in a large city. On the other hand, in a sewershed of 15k instead of 3M, this person's contribution would be enough to 4x the measured concentration. [1] https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444608921223169 https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444608921223169 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatment_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatm... [3] https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

qbasic_forever 3y ago

I think he has it backwards where this person lives and commutes. I spent 15 years living in Columbus and the idea that you would live in the very heart of the city and commute out to Washington Courthouse, a very small drive-by town (population of only 14k people!) in the huge rural expanse outside Columbus, is kind of bonkers. Columbus cost of living (especially in the heart of it) is much, much higher than WC so you'd be spending tons of money and commuting a couple hours a day for no good reason. I suspect this person lives in WC and works in downtown Columbus, like at Nationwide Insurance or one of other big corporate employers there, or perhaps they even work at the statehouse for the state government located there. They're probably doing their business in the office every day since they're spending most waking hours there during the week (and naturally get into a regular schedule). This would make a LOT more sense as the cost to live outside Columbus is significantly cheaper while commuting in isn't that bad (there are tons of highways all around and into the city). Perhaps this person even works a lower wage or benefit service job there and has no real healthcare benefits, paid time off, etc. to help them take care of health issues they might be suffering from a persistent COVID infection--more reason why they'd be living in a cheap town on the outskirts of the city and commuting in to their job downtown.

IanCal 3y ago
I think it's because it's seen always at he city and only sometimes at the town. You'd generally expect to see it primarily where you live. However, the person may have a strong preference for poopin' on the clock.
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- atdrummond 3y ago
  Funny you mention that - I dated a woman for three years who never once went to the bathroom (#2) at her house or mine. This wasn’t an objective of her’s; rather, she had such a precise internal clock that she went regularly a few minutes past ten every day. On the weekends, this meant she went at the gym on Saturday and at the church on Sunday. I didn’t think much of it at the time but realized years later that it was quite an incredibly odd streak she had built up.

lamontcg 3y ago

> If you do get a positive reading, I would suggest having someone else try with the same kind of test with their feces to be sure it isn’t a false positive. Weird shit happens. well played.

IanCal 3y ago

I'm a bit worried about this. Sometimes people on the internet get a bit... intense about solving a thing and finding someone. They don't always get it right either.

perihelions 3y ago

- "As academically interesting that this is, I think there are SERIOUS privacy concerns you're flirting with." - "Yeah, it gets complicated." It doesn't look complicated to me at all — you just want reputation points with your professional peers, and to hell with the patient. This internet-mob victim has been completely doxxed to the general public: {place of work; place of residence; chronically immunocompromised (probably)}. That's an N=1 almost certainly.