www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/health/covid-sewage-wastewater-data.html
First, spot-on NYT, you are right. I am so confident about WBE I am cashing all my Epi chips and going all in. It is the game changer I prayed for nightly during the first year of our humanity vs SARS-CoV trial along with a vaccine, which we sort of got, not really though from an old school Epi that likes his vaccines to ofcourse mitigate disease but also break chains of transmission.
My opinion doesn’t matter about vaccines though because I am not a clinician, also I’m hypocrite here because I would vaccinate myself with pond scum if the WHO and CDC told me it would help me suffer less when I get infected. Comment above really speaks more to how dynamically convalescent SARS-CoV “was”, no wait, actually from an Epi POV it’s still “is”.
Actually, SARS-CoV is evolving stronger today than it ever has before and today May 12th there is more of it then there will ever be of us. This matters because each one of those new pathogenic COVID-19 vectors that out number us when grouped by such an immense factor, has as its virulence superpower the ability to be ancient and brand new both at once and like a pawn in chess become the next VOC it wants to see in the world. Only here that pawn is invisible to the human eye and now most people will forget it’s still on the board.
I know this because I am a major Chess and Epi geek who had been tracking this demon spec of life since the first day and case and I know as surely as I know my name that we might ostensibly still be living the the SARS CoV prequel on this day of celebrating its end. It’s true we have won battles, we struggled to do so, but we did figure out a lot about the original SARS CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 now — including unfortunately learning how to surveil it and then how to hide it from our day-to-day attention. We even bent down the original virus’s curve but now we are tossing out those gains too.
I also think SARS-CoV has learned a lot from us, most notably that we are better at the 100 than the 1600. I fear it also will learn that because we say it’s not an emergency any longer more people will ignore SARS-CoV as it continues drifting , seroconverting, drifting and seroconverting through us. Surely it must recognize how far it’s come from plaguing a few rare exotic animals for millennia to its ecological explosion in 2020. Hopefully I guess, this inanimate parasite, will also mismanage its spoils of more substantial space, time, and number and be content to end out its existence resting on its laurels.
I guess if we bank on SARS-CoV giving up it doesn’t really matter the “Emergency” or keep it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t really care either way. Still I don’t see how I can be optimistic yet, and still follow my fellow sentient Brother Malcolm’s summation: I’m for the truth even when being so hurts. Surely though I’m not the only Epi that knows what we know now about SARS-CoV now and is still afraid of it.