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
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 @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
text/geminiThis content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).