Ancestors

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 Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 04:57

@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.

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Written by Infoseepage on 2025-01-19 at 05:01

@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.

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Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 05:14

@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.

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Written by Infoseepage on 2025-01-19 at 05:18

@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.).

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Toot

Written by Jonathan Kamens on 2025-01-19 at 05:25

@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.

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Descendants

Written by Infoseepage on 2025-01-19 at 05:28

@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.

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Written by Infoseepage on 2025-01-19 at 05:29

@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.

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