I've now seen several people, trusted sources of information about #COVID, dramatically misrepresent the CDC's new wastewater baselining methodology.
The misinformation has to stop.
This page explains what they are doing:
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/about-data.html#wastewater
If you don't understand what they're doing after reading that, then you're not qualified to comment on it and you should STFU.
🧵 1/3
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
What the CDC is doing is using the 10th percentile of the past 12 months of data for each wastewater measurement site as the baseline for measurements from that site. The baseline is recalculated every 6 months.
The purpose of this is to normalize measurements across testing sites.
It is a reasonable methodology. It is not going to suddenly result in the CDC graphs showing "no COVID" as people are claiming.
Again, go read the page if you don't believe me:
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/about-data.html#wastewater
[#]COVID
🧵 2/3
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
Please boost the first post in this thread to counter the misinformation, which is spreading very quickly. If you boosted the misinformation before realizing it was wrong, please unboost it.
:boostRequest:
🧵 3/3
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik
I'm not going to boost the first post in this thread, because it includes rude language addressed towards people, experts in their own fields, who are doing their best to spread accurate scientific information about covid
I do respect your knowledge and and your intentions
Now that web search has essentially been destroyed and it is more difficult for people to find information they don't already know, can you give us a little breakdown on how the math works, for example at a site with a history of readings from 1 to 100, in bell curve centered around 50?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from NilaJones@zeroes.ca
@NilaJones Your example is too open-ended to give a precise mathematical answer, and I'm not really sure a precise mathematical answer would be helpful to most people.
Tenth percentile, which is the baseline the CDC is now using, means ten percent of measured values from the previous year were below the baseline. I don't think they're doing this to make things look better than they are; I think they're doing it to correct for outliers, i.e., the occasional bad readings.
(continued)
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@NilaJones The important thing isn't the baseline, it's the fact that they're using standard deviation thresholds to determine whether virus levels are minimal, low, medium, or high.
I don't know whether they've changed the thresholds. I also don't know how they determined them, or how they play out in real life, since I haven't run the numbers.
If people want to check for nefarious intent, that's the place to look, not the baseline.
But again, I see no evidence of nefarious intent here.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik @NilaJones The way biobot normalized their samples seems to have been particularly good and I preferred the hard metric of viral copies/ml that they presented. Everything the government has done has been to try to get away from hard numbers comparable over a long time of sampling. It's very clearly politically motivated and serves no useful purpose to the public.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Infoseepage@mastodon.social
@Infoseepage @NilaJones The raw data is still made available to people who want to slice and dice it differently, and there are orgs doing that, like https://www.pmc19.com/data/index.php.
The CDC has decided that if they tell people that COVID is bad all the time and people should me maximizing precautions all the time, the result will be most people never taking any precautions.
That sucks, but it's the reality we are living in.
I don't know how to fix it, and I doubt the CDC does either.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik @NilaJones I've been largely behaviorally invariant since sometime in 2020. I don't dial my behavior up and down with the exception of healthcare procedures, which I try to schedule for times in between waves. I've gone to great lengths to find providers that still practice a high degree of airborne hygiene (dentist, optometrist, etc.).
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Infoseepage@mastodon.social
@Infoseepage @NilaJones Yes, me too.
We are not typical.
The vast majority of the population has shown no willingness to live this way.
We can debate until we're blue in the face how we got where we are, but it's all water under the bridge.
I don't know that there's any way to fix it.
I know we all love to hate on the CDC. God knows they've made a lot of mistakes. But right now I think they're trying to make the best hand they can with the cards they've been dealt.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik @NilaJones I no longer view the CDC as a sound source of either public health policy or individual advice. My faith in them has been completely eroded over the course of the pandemic. God help us if H5N1 becomes a pandemic while Trump is in office.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Infoseepage@mastodon.social
@jik @NilaJones
There are a handful of nations which I think during Covid showed themselves to be able to respond reasonably rationally and proportionately to a pandemic threat in defense of their population. China, Taiwan, New Zealand, to some extent Australia, and maybe a handful of others. They might be able to repeat the trick during another pandemic. The US? Hah.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Infoseepage@mastodon.social
@jik
Are they telling people to take precautions right now?
Looking at this from a French perspective, where we're having a flu epidemic and yet no public health messaging about masks and ventilation, it does seems to me that their reasoning is more "we don't want to have to tell people to take precautions, therefore we're changing the measures / "breaking the thermometer" so that we won't have to"
@Infoseepage @NilaJones
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from syderiaos@piaille.fr
@syderiaos
I love that analogy! "Breaking the thermometer"
@jik @Infoseepage @NilaJones
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from justyourluck@masto.ai
@syderiaos @Infoseepage They're currently being about as aggressive as they get, but, as @NilaJones points out, that isn't particularly aggressive.
Their periodic respiratory disease update emails have asked people to take more precautions about Flu, RSV, and COVID (one of the ways they hide their advocacy about COVID is to group it with other diseases that are circulating) because of the high levels, but they don't mention masking unless you click through to their web site and dig around a bit.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik
Thank you for your response
What I've been seeing on the west coast is that the lowest points of the year are about level with the peak of the Delta wave -- which at the time was considered unimaginably high
If we redefine that Delta peak as zero, things look a lot different
Compared, for example, to the California state wastewater website, which defines that Delta peak as HIGH
Suddenly values that used to range from High to Super High to Mega High, now range from zero to [whatever they are designating the other points]
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from NilaJones@zeroes.ca
@NilaJones You're 100% correct that what the CDC is doing here is saying that the baseline level, even if it reflects a lot of COVID circulating, is "the new normal" and should be called "minimal" on their charts.
But that's what they were doing before. That hasn't changed. All that's changed is that they're normalizing the data across different data collection sites.
I don't think they should've accepted ongoing COVID spread as the new normal, but that ship sailed long ago.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@NilaJones And even with them doing that there are still going to be surges every year big enough to get designated as "high." Well, at least until Trump totally fucks up the CDC and makes them change the methodology again or stop publishing the data and levels entirely. 🤦
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@NilaJones @jik Plot it on a log scale, you can see the whole history pretty easily. Boston is not especially low right now, though it is (probably) trending down now. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTNfbw0Xf-3-3jg_icrM0vM1suWwKWERy3sOGDITI8DNWIBvmORZ9Rrzc56flZO7uP3wr-BPbpZP6JJ/pubchart?oid=1719853729&format=interactive
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from dr2chase@ohai.social
@jik
"I don't think they're doing this to..."
"I doubt the CDC..."
"The CDC has decided..."
"I think they're trying to..."
So... trust the CDC because you say so? That's not going to go far with the crowd you're targeting...
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from justyourluck@masto.ai
@justyourluck My goal isn't to get people to trust the CDC. It's to get people to stop spreading misinformation.
You raise good questions about what the impact of this change will be. I've offered my opinion, but you're right that I could be wrong. I am not, however, wrong about the fact the what people were claiming last night about the new methodology was 100% bogus, and trusted sources with large followings have a higher obligation to get things right and verify before boosting.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@justyourluck I have tried to be quite clear in this thread about what is my opinion vs. what facts I am asserting. If I've failed in some of my posts to do that, I'm sorry.
I do not agree with the point you seem to be trying to make that it's not OK for me to express opinions in a thread in which I'm also pointing out facts. Sorry, but no.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik
You absolutely can have an opinion and say so. I was reading the thread trying to get clarification and kept running into your opinions which started to feel like to ME as if you were trying to speak for the CDC as to why they are doing what they're doing and their intent. Kind of a trigger for me so apologies if that was just a me thing. And honestly, I no longer trust the CDC's intent at all, no matter what it is & I know I'm not alone.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from justyourluck@masto.ai
@justyourluck I trust the CDC to do what I think they're trying to do, which is to minimize harm as best they can to people who aren't being COVID-cautious and won't be no matter what the CDC tells them.
I don't trust the CDC to be honest about the risks of getting COVID or to overtly give advice that is useful to COVID-cautious people, because doing those things would sabotage their efforts to help COVID-careless people, and also unfortunately isn't politically viable.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@justyourluck Having worked for the federal government for about a year and a half, I now have a far better and more visceral understanding of three things:
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from jik@federate.social
@jik
Yep. I'll add:
It's one of the toughest pills to swallow and we see it in the news with pandemics and other disasters all the time.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from justyourluck@masto.ai
@jik
Fair enough. The last 2 words are pretty key.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from justyourluck@masto.ai This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini