What Does The Florida Sewage Story Mean?

I am humbly asking you, my masters, because as you’ve probably noticed I ain’t no scientist. Every day 5-10 pieces appear here which I have no hope of comprehending. I am very grateful to have been permitted aboard this great vessel even just as a lowly, displaced, er, “Ratty”.
So didja see the story about Omicron being ubiquitous in Florida’s wastewater, even though nobody has yet reported clinical symptoms from it? Of course, Gutfeld, the Potentate of Poopjokes, had a wonderful time with this story! But it is true. And it SEEMS to me it should be good news. The virus has passed through a lot of Floridians without them even noticing? And now they have natural immunity?
Could it be like HPV, with which 90% of all sexually active adults are or have been infected at some point, and which infections usually clear in a short time with no treatment?
That reminds me of the most recent vaccine furor, about 15 BC, (before Covid) when we all had to get our adolescent daughters two painful shots of “Gardasil”. Yeah okay, sometimes a Human Papilloma Virus infection is associated with cervical and (as I recall) throat cancer. It would be remarkable if it weren’t, since as noted, 90% of all sexually active adults carry it. But, 90% of all sexually active adults do not get those cancers, obviously. Cui bono? Merck & Co.
Leaving that aside, my masters:
DOES the ubiquity of the virus in wastewater mean a lot of Floridians have already had it and not noticed?
And if it does, why is that not GREAT news?

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Hypatia – personally, I am quite judicious about paying attention to news services, because they are mostly propaganda trying to influence us in a particular direction. So, no, I have not seen anything about this particular item. Do you have a link with some more details?

I would be interested in learning who is testing Florida wastewaters for Covid viruses, and what technology they are using. The normal expectation is that viruses don’t live long outside their host.

As to the infection – remember the cruise ship back at the beginning of the CovidScam? About 4,000 people crammed together for weeks on board. 80% of them did not catch the virus. Of those who did, the infection was generally rather mild. Only about 10 people died – all very old cruise passengers with pre-existing medical conditions. Not really much of a cause for panic, only for sensible precautions for the susceptible population.

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You hit the nail on the head directly, driving it into the wood with one blow.

”Moronic” variant has become ubiquitous. Only the news still thinks Delta is THE ONE. BUT one doesn’t see Delta except as the left-over bug. Meanwhile “Moronic” is running loose, and it has mutated to the point it is very infectious but not very virulent. MOST people don’t even know they have it. Some get somewhat more ill, and only a very few get desperately ill. We have recently had our first death! FIRST!

We have had large swaths of the populace “vaccinated”. It has only driven the mutations to increase. We now have a virus that is trying to survive by wide spread without killing the host. THAT should drive natural immunity, by far the best - and arguably the ONLY, true immunity, to put an end to this scourage.

And watch for Biden to take credit for this. We should be seeing a new “Fauci position” shortly, giving the likes of Dave Chappell more material to laugh at.

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Don’t be too humbled, @Hypatia . Here’s some ancillary sciencey language to accompany your post.

Science

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It means the newspapers are trying to sell papers and online media are trying for clicks. Fear sells, so fear-producing stories are the order of the day.

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Yes but this should be a reassuring story, not a scary one.

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Depends on how you frame it. A good newspaperman can make Heidi seem like a horror story or Dr. Mengele look like Dr. Schweitzer.

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It IS! Reassuring not scary. You just have to think for yourself, a rare commodity today.

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Enjoying a sporting event with 50,000 screaming people not wearing masks for a few hours hasn’t caused the extinction of the species. Not wearing your mask at Cheesecake Factory gets the cops rolling. The dichotomy doesn’t register.

I wonder what it is like to have all your thoughts implanted by the corporate media without even knowing it.

The US spike in positive tests will likely happen in January and the hyperventilating of the press will be full on. Hospitalizations could rise simply because a smaller percentage of larger numbers can be higher.

Don’t ask why 2 years and trillions of fake bucks spending hasn’t resulted in any change in hospital beds. It’s as if in WW2 the US would have manufactured candy bars and passed out bucks, but never built a tank, gun, ship or plane.

Gotta flatten the curve to prevent hospitals from being over run. The delta really going to over run the beds. The unvaccinated going to cause an over run of beds. Omnicron going to cause an overrun.

Yet nobody seems to want to ask dr egomania “why not go ahead and add a bed?”

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“So didja see the story about Omicron being ubiquitous in Florida’s wastewater, even though nobody has yet reported clinical symptoms from it? Of course, Gutfeld, the Potentate of Poopjokes, had a wonderful time with this story! But it is true. And it SEEMS to me it should be good news. The virus has passed through a lot of Floridians without them even noticing? And now they have natural immunity?”

It is a lot more complicated. Omicron is up in the measles class for infectious. The bad news is that it is so much more infectious than delta that it has already become the dominant version in the UK. The good news is that it seems to cause severe disease less often.

“Could it be like HPV, with which 90% of all sexually active adults are or have been infected at some point, and which infections usually clear in a short time with no treatment?”

Now you are talking about something even more complicated than covid versions. There are dozens of HPV viruses and while you are right that cases clear without treatment (I don’t think there is any treatment) close to all cervical cancers are due to HPV making cells pre-cancerous. Rising throat cancers are a fascinating insight into shifting sexual practices. HPV vaccines to prevent cervical cancer are an amazingly good idea.

“DOES the ubiquity of the virus in wastewater mean a lot of Floridians have already had it and not noticed?”

No.

Wastewater surveillance is a really useful tool. What I expect it to show over the next few weeks in Florida is a rise of omicron and a fall of delta. Omicron is so infectious that it will most likely become dominant before New Year, and perhaps before Christmas.

As to what will happen in Florida, watch the UK. They are a week or two ahead, it’s not known if the omicron surge will swamp the hospitals or not. California is perhaps two or three weeks behind the UK.

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"As to the infection – remember the cruise ship back at the beginning of the CovidScam? About 4,000 people crammed together for weeks on board. 80% of them did not catch the virus. "

It’s worth noting that the current evolved version of the virus is at least 100 times as infectious as the original.

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So what? When people get an infection which is so mild that they don’t know they have been infected, has the tree really fallen in the forest?

Conventional view is that most virus outbreaks mutate so that they become more infectious and much less serious. Successful parasites do not kill their hosts. Is there any evidence to suggest that the CovidScam is departing from normal expectations?

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The research, based on UK infection data, casts doubt on the hopes of some experts that a change in the virulence of the new variant would ease the pressure on health systems despite Omicron’s high levels of infectiousness. “The study finds no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta, judged by either the proportion of people testing positive who report symptoms, or by the proportion of cases seeking hospital care after infection,” said the research team, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease modeller and government science adviser. However, they cautioned that hospitalisation data “remains very limited at this time.” The study said data suggested “at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta.” Early reports from medics in South Africa’s Gauteng province, the centre of the Omicron outbreak there, had raised hopes that the variant’s mutations might have led to a change in the virus’ biology causing it to be less severe.

“Conventional view is that most virus outbreaks mutate so that they become more infectious and much less serious.”

Over the short term, infectiousness gets selected. There is not a lot of evolutionary pressure for the severity to be selected one way or the other. The second year the 1918 flu came around, it was more deadly than the first time.

I am not sure how covid fits with “normal expectations.”

At this point, I expect the worst is yet to come.

This is the same “Professor” Ferguson who was predicting 2 million deaths in the US in Round One of the CovidScam. Whatever he says carries no weight – in fact, has to be treated as agitprop for Project Fear.

Color me ‘unconvinced’.

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In fact, this is the same Ferguson who was a strong proponent of the Lock Down rules in the UK which have caused such heavy economic & social distress – and then ignored the very rules he had promoted in order to facilitate his adulterous affair.

Prof Neil Ferguson resigns after meeting married lover in lockdown | Metro News

Back in the days when the British Lion still roared, government minister Profumo was caught in an affair. He resigned from the government and spent much of the rest of his life volunteering in a charity in the slums of London to expiate his shame. How far has England fallen! And how far have we fallen that news media still report on Ferguson as if he were someone trustworthy?

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I did a cut and paste from Slashdot for the news about omicron. I am not impressed with attacks on the foibles of researchers outside of their research. I should note that early in the pandemic, a prediction of 2 million for the US was not outside typical error bounds. It’s not over and it is still possible that the deaths in the US could go over that number.

But omicron spread and severity in the UK is not a long-term projection like certain other things that people argue about. The situation will be clear by the end of the year, which is only 11 days away.

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A foible would be always insisting on strawberries for breakfast. Deliberately flaunting an onerous regulation which Ferguson himself had been key in imposing was not a foible – it was a disgrace!

If one wants to talk about Ferguson’s research – note that this is the same Ferguson who ducked & weaved when scientists requested him to provide access to the code for his models which (erroneously) predicted such Covid disaster, hardly the action of a trustworthy researcher. And let’s not get into the massive economic harm Ferguson had caused earlier with a requirement to euthanize over 10 Million farm animals in the UK through controversial modelling of a foot & mouth disease outbreak back in 2001.

If one wants to convince, one does not reference Ferguson.

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I don’t keep up with social reputations in the UK. Bad enough to try to do it in the US.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/19/fauci-warns-omicron-variant-will-cause-record-high-coronavirus-hospitalizations-deaths-us/

This is probably behind a paywall for you.

" Top government health officials on Sunday warned that the United States will probably see record numbers of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations as the omicron variant spreads rapidly and forces Americans to again grapple with the dangers of a pandemic that has upended life around the globe.

“Unfortunately, I think that that is going to happen. We are going to see a significant stress in some regions of the country on the hospital system, particularly in those areas where you have a low level of vaccination,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease specialist, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked whether the United States could see record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Fauci described the variant as “extraordinary” in its transmissibility, with a doubling time of two to three days. It accounts for 50 percent of coronavirus cases in parts of the country, which meant it would almost certainly take over as the dominant variant in the United States, he added.

Keith – I don’t mean to be rude. But really – FAUCI ? Mr. Flip-Flop himself!

If there is one person in the world I would be less willing to trust on the CovidScam than “Prof” Ferguson, it is Anthony S. Fauci.

I will take the CovidScam seriously when its promoters return to the standard time-honored meaning of a “case” as a sick person with signs & symptoms of a disease – not a healthy asymptomatic individual with a possibly False Positive test result from a rather ill-defined test procedure. Of course, if they did that, the risk is that the “epidemic” would largely disappear.

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Gavin, your worldview and mine are completely incompatible.

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