The MIT study reported in the Boston Herald might be good news if it holds up. It would suggest that a lot of people have had C19 and have at least some immunity. I wonder if it suggests that there are at least two strains of the virus. That would raise a further question of how much immunity a weaker strain provides.
That may be valuable in the fall as well.
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Wow, that's a data collection method I hadn't considered. I usually wouldn't say this about feces, but I'd like to know more about this process. I'm guessing they can identify individuals by DNA, but how do they know whether one person's waste is contaminating others' waste or not? Not that I'm suspicious they can't do it, I just don't know enough about this type of thing to make an educated guess. Well, I can give it a shot: maybe the sewage environment is non-conducive to spreading the virus.
Even in my own field I'm sometimes surprised by how far a team can move the state of the art in a very short time, but in the linked article, sentences such as “Our next step to make our Covid-19 case estimation model more accurate is to model the person-to-person variability in SARS-CoV-2 shedding in stool,” make me think that their "more than 100K" number is not much stronger than a guess.
I don't want to downplay the significance of them being able to detect and track the level of virus in sewage samples - this could (and probably will) be a very significant advance in tracking the disease, and I can see it being useful to public health officials in informing decisions about loosening stay-at-home rules, or bringing restrictions back if the infection-rate goes up again in the future.
It also means that a great many deaths the virus has caused are not being counted.
@ PenGun - how so? I don't follow
In many places, as well as the surge of Covid 19 deaths, there is also a general surge of deaths. Most of these are undiagnosed Covid 19 deaths. It is actually possible to test those who died, but its no ones priority.
If your testing is not great, and not very many places are doing enough testing, a large mass of infected people are not counted, neither are their deaths. This is true of most of the world.
Ah yes, similar to my next post. I thought you had found an additional angle. You put it well.
The virus survives very well in feces. Any place with infections will have it in their sewage. In fact its quite dangerous to sewage plant workers.
I watch this guy every morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUZEtJHQhE
He is a valuable resource indeed and today's, above, is a quite interesting analysis.
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