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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 03:06

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.

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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 03:12

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

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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 03:14

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:

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Written by NilaJones on 2025-01-19 at 04:24

@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?

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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 04:50

@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)

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Written by NilaJones on 2025-01-19 at 04:57

@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]

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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 05:06

@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.

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Toot

Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 05:08

@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. 🤦

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