COVID--19: Wastewater--the Key to Detecting the Coronavirus

Today is both Boys' Day and Cinco de Mayo.  Boy's Day came from Japanese immigrants in Hawaii.  Girl's Day was on March 3.  In Japan they combined both and today celebrate a holiday called Children's Day, the final day of Golden Week, a period when people travel...except not this year.  Many exhibit windsock carps, or koi.  Why?  Goes back to a Chinese legend that this fish swims upstream to become a dragon and flies to Heaven.  Even the colors are meaningful:  black for father, red/pink for mother and other colors, usually blue, for the children.  There are variations, as some use red for the oldest son.  This is a day for consuming sweetish mochi (pounded rice).

Five years ago, this blog site said:

Today is May 5, or Cinco de Mayo in Spanish. The day now is sort of a Mexican holiday celebrating an unexpected victory on May 5, 1862 over a superior French army that had not experience defeat in almost half a century. 

While relatively insignificant in Mexico, possibly because France prevailed anyway a few years later, and only bowed out of the country on American pressure, the date is observed around the world as a celebration of Mexican pride and heritage. The U.S. is particularly indulgent about international festivities of this nature, and, like St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest, there might be a parade, and, almost surely, considerable partying, featuring tequila, usually in the form of margaritas, plus any form of Mexican beer.

Interestingly enough, I went on to say:

This day takes special importance this year because the swine flu has devastated Mexican tourism. But there will be no recovery because even in the U.S., several cities, such as Dallas and Chicago, cancelled the celebration in fear of this non-existent epidemic.

For more than six years I remember Cinco de Mayo at some bar in California or Nevada with Kenji Sumida' golf safari.  We golfed six straight days and drank too much.

Not much in crowded drunkfests this year, but certain restaurants still offer take-outs.  I have various kinds of tequila, and will find some way to work them into my lunch, dinner and TV-watching today.

From Worldometer, I have adjusted this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

May   1         0    269   1897      281          113               1        5624
          2         0    474    1691     276            76               2        5215
          3         0    174    1154     164            54               0        3481
          4         0    195    1324     164          127               2        4096

Summary:

• Mostly up in new deaths.
• Japan had 49 new deaths.  Read about a second wave on Hokkaido.  A warning to those states in the U.S. now opening up.
• Worrisome that India had 175 new deaths and 3,932 new cases.
• Brazil had 7,119 new cases.
• Of course, the leader is the USA with 24,713 new cases and 1,324 new deaths.  And we're jumping into restoring our economy!

There seems to be a development that could well help prevent future pandemics.  From Popular Science:

Depending on temperature and other local conditions, it should in theory be possible to detect the novel coronavirus even if it was excreted by a single infected person and then mixed in with the poop of between 100 and 2 million other people.  The researchers also crunched some numbers to find out how much money sewage sampling could save in the U.S. They calculated that it should be possible to collect fecal data from the nation’s 15,014 wastewater treatment plants within several days. This screen would cover about 70 percent of the U.S. population; because septic systems do not convey their waste to treatment plants, people who use them would not be represented. The whole venture would cost about $225,000. 

By contrast, the team estimated, diagnostic tests for all 330 million or so Americans would cost around $3.5 billion. Sewage testing could never fully replace traditional diagnostic tests. Importantly, wastewater sampling can’t identify which individuals are infected. But sewage sampling would make diagnostic testing more efficient by signaling where officials should be testing people more aggressively.

Also:

The United States has lagged behind many other nations in testing people for COVID-19. Testing efforts have ramped up in recent weeks and since late March the U.S. has been averaging 150,000 tests per day. However, researchers at Harvard University recently estimated that the country would have to perform up to 20 million diagnostic tests daily to fully reopen the economy.

Of course you need both, but the wastewater testing system can be established for all prominent global sites to daily check the presence and change of COVID-19 concentration, and other bacterial/viral diseases, to provide early warning and track changes.

From the Washington Post:

“S--- is a great source of information,” said Hirschberg, founder of a nonprofit biotech firm and professor at the University of Washington at Tacoma. “This is the kind of early warning system you want to have. When people start showing up at hospitals and start dying, that’s not the indicator you want to have. That’s too late.”

So far, the samples have consistently shown a higher concentration of virus in places with more intense outbreaks. And the firm’s modeling, which estimates the likely number of cases in an area based on the amount of virus in wastewater, corroborates what other researchers are also finding: Many more people have covid-19 than official counts suggest.  “Our estimates are about 10 times higher than the cumulative [confirmed] cases up to that date,” said Mariana Matus (above), a Biobot co-founder.

The TEN TIMES HIGHER figure regarding COVID-19 cases reinforces my posting yesterday (scroll down to next article) which also suggested so.

Here are the top 30 songs of 1973, in ten minutes.  I recall back then being involved in the Hawaii Geothermal Project in Puna (those mosquitos were all over us), the Miami Dolphins completing the only perfect season in the NFL, the USA losing the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal of Nixon and spending a summer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on laser fusion, with an apartment adjacent to a Wente Brothers vineyard.  My favorite wines then were Lambrusco and Blue Nun.

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