THE GREAT POOP DUPE

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Jeff Childers explains

The New York Times reporters are just obsessed with Americans’ bathroom habits. The Gray Lady ran a scatalogical story yesterday (non-paywalled!) headlined, “We Are in a Big Covid Wave. But Just How Big?”

(That’s what she said.)

It was another unintentionally hilarious feces-focus story, and in a sane world the conversation about wastewater testing as anything but a fetid fetish should be over. The sub-headline seemed to recognize the thin ice over the septic pond, admitting “Wastewater data has become perhaps the best metric to track the spread of the virus in the U.S., but it’s an imperfect tool.”

Note: the C.D.C. calculates a viral activity level for each testing site as the number of standard deviations above a baseline, set at the 10th percentile of the normalized viral RNA concentration data. The national estimate is the median activity level for sites with at least six weeks of data.
Remember — the Covidians are clutching their wastewater data the way a hypochondriac hangs onto two months of carefully-collected stool samples. The article recognized this, acknowledging “For many who remain at higher risk from the virus — like those who are older, immunocompromised or already have a serious illness — it’s become a crucial tool helping them understand when to be particularly careful.” It’s all they have left! The other measurements have let them down. Disappointingly, as the article admitted, covid “hospitalizations and deaths have remained far lower than in previous years.”

So without wastewater estimates, it would be all over, time to take off the mask. Which is a terrifying nightmare for your average Covidian.

The sub-headline euphemistically called the viral-load estimates “imperfect.” How imperfect? Well, first — as that inscrutable disclaimer indicated — they lack data from everywhere. They only have it from a few testing sites. Just how many is a closely-guarded secret. Nobody’s saying how many sites are included; whatever that number is, it appears to change from week to week. That’s why they extrapolate the national figure.

Meaning, they’re guessing. Again.

But the, um, lack of precision gets even worse. Wastewater testing is doo-doo voodoo. Here are the various problems described at various points in the article, which I edited together:

(Wastewater testing is) an imperfect metric, useful primarily for identifying if there’s an acceleration of virus spread, not for telling you exactly how much virus is circulating. The data is often reported as normalized viral copies per milliliter or per gram, a number that is nearly impossible to translate into precise case counts. And the C.D.C. doesn’t show the actual concentration levels — its dashboard instead shows how much they have increased relative to when spread was low.
The amount of RNA in a sample will fluctuate depending on many factors, including the local population at any given time — think of a holiday influx into Miami or a college town emptying out for summer — and how much other material, such as industrial waste, is in the system. A peak in the data may not mean exactly the same thing this year as it did last year.
And nationwide estimates can be tricky. The data excludes people with septic tanks and cities with no wastewater testing. There can be data lapses, as when the C.D.C. switched contractors last year. Existing sites can stop testing, and new sites start up, as the network changes and expands.
Finally, there are changes to the virus itself that could make comparisons over time more difficult. Scientists say there are hints that this latest variant, JN.1, may be able to better replicate in the gut. It could mean that infected people shed more viral copies than they used to, (making the) same number of infections look like a lot more Covid.
Sounds great. By “great,” I mean completely unreliable. What does the Times suggest Covidians do with all these stinky problems that make wastewater testing look like a pile of BS? Here is the country’s top newspaper’s scientific suggestion:

Many experts who study this data recommend dropping any notion of precision and just squinting a little at the line’s recent trajectory.
Just squint at the wastewater data! No, not that much. If you squint just right, you might even start to believe.

It’s Science, so shut up.