Ohio cryptic lineage update
twitter.com
twitter.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Viral researchers believe someone in central Ohio has been infected with COVID-19 for at least two years, and they want to find that person.
While the researchers believe there is no threat to public health, they hope this case holds much-needed answers to treating long COVID.
[...]
Johnson stressed that this is not a threat to public health, explaining that the virus is inactive once it passes through the gastrointestinal tract.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Health said health officials are not fully convinced that the cryptic strain is linked to only one person, but they are not investigating it because it poses no threat to public health.
How do they know that only the gastrointestinal tract is infected in this person?
How can they possibly know this? This person has a novel COVID strain that could be more or less virulent--we just have no way of knowing.
But that says nothing about how infectious this strain would be, or how virulent if it were to be contracted as a respiratory infection. This could be the new Delta/Omicron, or worse. We could be one explosive diarrhea away from a new pandemic.
Currently it's not. So, currently no problem. If it changes, then it could be, yes. Which is true for any virus. If they change, they could potentially harm lots of people. That's life, and that's why we have the CDC and WHO etc. who keep an eye on things and try to react once that's needed. (Which lots of conspiracy theorists don't like, but that's life too.)
(Also, please avoid inhaling somebody else's feces.)
I suspect this person lives in WC and works in downtown Columbus, like at Nationwide Insurance or one of other big corporate employers there, or perhaps they even work at the statehouse for the state government located there. They're probably doing their business in the office every day since they're spending most waking hours there during the week (and naturally get into a regular schedule).
This would make a LOT more sense as the cost to live outside Columbus is significantly cheaper while commuting in isn't that bad (there are tons of highways all around and into the city). Perhaps this person even works a lower wage or benefit service job there and has no real healthcare benefits, paid time off, etc. to help them take care of health issues they might be suffering from a persistent COVID infection--more reason why they'd be living in a cheap town on the outskirts of the city and commuting in to their job downtown.
However, the person may have a strong preference for poopin' on the clock.
I didn’t think much of it at the time but realized years later that it was quite an incredibly odd streak she had built up.
I call BS. Sorry to say, she may not have been entirely honest with you.
I can only recall her being sick once, with the flu.
It'll never cease to amaze me how commonly people in the US get food poisoning based on their comments.
Not getting food poisoning or the flu in three years is surprising?
This also removes some of the spooky surveillance overtones, since the genetic material being tracked originates from a virus, not a human genome.
Edit: on second thought, probably the original title is better (in keeping with the site guidelines). Better to let the comments hash out what it actually means.
In context: Elizabeth Holmes has been locked up, while Anderson Lee Aldritch had a string of mental health evaluations before going on to commit mass murder.
I don't believe that is accurate, but I am open to changing my mind with more details.
In most states, an involuntary psychiatric commitment cannot extend beyond 72 hours without a formal hearing. This 3-day period allows patients to receive basic medical treatment, recover from psychotic episodes, and hopefully understand the need for further help.
The patient has the option of remaining voluntarily under care or committing to receiving continued outpatient treatment. Nevertheless, after the first 72 hours have passed, the patient can decline to comply with any further medical treatment.
Saying you can't be held without a formal hearing is like saying the police can't search you without a warrant. Completely and irrefutably true by the letter of the law.
I'm not sure if you've ever tried to "decline compliance" with psychiatric treatment, but that will also go on your record every time, and sooner or later there will be a solid case built to court-order your "treatment", because you're just so bothersome to the system.
A lot has changed since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; hospital administrators have almost zero interest in keeping people any longer than they have to, since many people do not have health insurance, and sometimes present a risk to hospital staff.
We have no legal way of forcibly removing people from society, for their own safety and the safety of others, until they have an interaction with police, or commit an actual crime, and then they go to jail.
Which is good news, really. Before I did the calculation I was worried that a single highly-infected person might be enough to skew the numbers all by themselves even in a large city.
On the other hand, in a sewershed of 15k instead of 3M, this person's contribution would be enough to 4x the measured concentration.
[1] https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444608921223169
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatm...
The obvious one being: To what extent could an arbitrary (non-infected) person's general whereabouts be tracked through municipal wastewater surveillance, given a large amount of resources?
But I think we’re a few decades away from being able to quickly hash every human gene to fingerprint individual dnas within huge populations.
For example looking for populations that aren't leaving houses.
It's a far-fetched scenario, but I don't know enough about the breakdown of DNA in wastewater to know if it'd be possible to locate him via this method. If he wasn't shedding a unique strain of a virus, let's say, but where his genetics are known.
This researcher explained to a reporter how they conducted a binary search of sewer lines from the treatment plant, all the way back to a single manhole which was only fed by a single employer with 30 employees. I just don't know if this is only possible using viral RNA, or if anyone's DNA would be possible to search on in a similar manner. For good public health reasons, we're likely to have continual wastewater surveillance at all major plants going forward - I just don't know how far it could be pushed.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/human-genomic-bycatc... ("We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies")
[0]https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade...
"According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces.
The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools.
In other words, espionage via excrement."
I've seen similar claims made on the Internet about the U.S. president and the French president, although these ones aren't proven. Macron did refuse a COVID test on his trip to Russia in early 2022 presumably due to concerns about DNA collection.
well played.
But with common or typical strains, it wouldn’t be easy to determine if you have a few highly shedding individuals or a lot of lightly shedding ones. That’s one issue with wastewater sampling for infectious diseases, versus what the technique was developed for: detecting pharma/recreational drug use in a population.
They've explained it before -- https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444605511311362... -- while they aren't confirming it's exactly one person, they've got strong data to suggest it's likely just one person, and for sure not some kind of community outbreak situation.
To complicate things, people flush more than poop down the drain. And poop with different regularity along with location preferences.
(The second thing being another reason why wastewater analysis is better for drugs/metabolites that excrete through urine)
It may not be a single person, but the individual(s) being infected exhibiting the same movement patterns would certainly be living together in close contact, and the lack of community spread supports the group of patients being very small, possibly just an individual.
The hypothesis is that it's the same individual, based on the fact that the virus samples are drifting together. From another tweet by the same author https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1666411725527171072 :
The lineage in just two sewersheds. The sequence drifts over time, but the sequence in the two sewersheds drift together. If it were multiple people the sequence would form distinct branches. We don't have proof it's one person, but it is the most likely explanation.
“We started tracking it,” Johnson said. “So, we started from the main treatment plant of over 100,000 people, and sort of like checked all the lines. And all of them, only one of the lines had the lineage. And so we would just keep going — checking… all of the pieces of the web, figuring out– following it up, up the line until we got to a single manhole. That manhole actually only got waste from one place, which was a company (that) had about 30 employees.”
my point is valid. They are able to do quite a bit of tracking through wastewater. That removes most of the anonymity.
The twitter user you linked to seems to agree.
https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665525245451665408
This is deeply gross, and the researcher should rethink his/her approach to patient care. This is not a cool puzzle. This is a human being, who is just trying to live their life without being doxed by their poop.
This tweet alone could probably dox someone.
1600 people a day make that commute.
"Washington Court House is a town of 15k (not an actual courthouse)."
- "Yeah, it gets complicated."
It doesn't look complicated to me at all — you just want reputation points with your professional peers, and to hell with the patient.
This internet-mob victim has been completely doxxed to the general public: {place of work; place of residence; chronically immunocompromised (probably)}. That's an N=1 almost certainly.
I believe this is why various lockdown strategies didn't work to eliminate COVID, even in very authoritarian places which can effectively enforce the lockdowns.
All it takes is one person to have a persistent 'forever infection' like this, and you will never eliminate the disease from your country. Even if you lock down with no person to person contact for months, as soon as you end the lockdown the disease will appear.
The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.
Let alone that that lockdowns + prison + tracking those with persistent infections was the next logical step in the case of TFA
I of course also realized that it's impossible for everyone to actually be locked down with no contact.
Recreational activities (even solo ones) faced the harshest enforcement.
The least functional restrictions, the harshest on mental health of those impacted, on top of severe isolation issues that many faced. Luckily I can handle isolation quite well contrary to most folks I know, and I had 1 and then 2 babies to consume all attention but few were so lucky.
Also Switzerland where I live didn't enforce basically any hard restriction on movement, just asked politely to stay home if you can, so whoever wanted to do sport outside just did it. Unlike say neighboring France which went batshit crazy with 1km-around-your-home one (so much for 'liberte', I find the more politicians talk about some catch word the less they actually mean to adhere to it when it matters).
Quarantines and lockdowns work really well for less communicable diseases. Given we didn't know how communicable COVID was early on, or that the absurdly easy to spread omicron variant would come along, assuming proper lockdowns could contain COVID wasn't unreasonable.
Also, prior to omicron, some countries (Vietnam, China are the two I know of) did manage to completely stop COVID with targeted lockdowns and quarantines.
In particular, SARS was successfully contained and then eliminated using similar measures in 2002–2004, so it was not totally absurd to think in the initial phases that it might work again for SARS 2.
Ironically Omicron was exactly one such "cryptic lineage" that effectively descended from alpha and incubated in a presumed immuno-compromised and/or AIDS patient in South Africa while delta was already dominant.
So any potential for global elimination was already foiled by exactly the sort of thing discussed in the article.
And then those people made it their whole identity till this very day.
So phrases like “stop the spread” was taken literally by both proponents and opponents.
And “mitigate the spread while we increase treatment capacity but then don’t” Was far too complicated for the population
Another thing that gets missed in these discussions is that Washington State was following the best data that they had, and you could watch it on the Department of Health's website. When cases started trending upwards they would wait for the hospitalization rate to trend upward and the bed count to reach a certain point and then ratchet down on the controls. When the trends reversed and fell below a certain point they would loosen the controls. It was very predictable what would happen next if you watched the DOH's website.
There was also a very gradual decoupling of the hospitalization rate from the case rate the first summer vaccinations were widespread, and that seemed to demonstrate that as a public health measure vaccination was very effective.
But, some mistakes pushed us towards too much lock-down, and some mistakes pushed us towards too little lock-down, and perhaps they balanced out to something close to optimal. Not only in the case of lock-downs, but in other things too: surely some executive acted with primary concern for profits, and surely some others spread baseless anti-vax conspiracies. Maybe they balance out?
Maybe society is like a huge machine learning model. It has many errors, sometimes it estimates too high, sometimes it estimates too low. We are always striving to correct both types of errors, but the errors do not stop us from finding an approximate middle path which is often good enough.
He doesn't go so far as to say "optimal," but Janan Ganesh recently made a similar point in the Financial Times:
Health policy aside, we clearly stimulated too much, but if you look at what the administration and lawmakers were saying back then they said things like "we'd rather err on the side of too much stimulus rather than too little," a sentiment that I think most people agreed with at the time, and, well, that's what we got.
> The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.
It seems like you could identify them and then treat them so they wouldn't need to be locked up forever, but there'd be no reason to close your borders as long as you quarantined and tested everyone on entry.
Presumably this "forever infection" is due to the person lacking an immune response to overcome the disease. You probably just need to treat their HIV or whatever it is that's causing that, and they'll stop having COVID.
This is a difficult tightrope to walk. In her case, I suspect she's mentally ill, which is a very real problem.
The issue is that there's a "slippery slope," where all kinds of conditions could become used as excuses to lock people up.
Those of us "of a certain age," will remember that the Soviet Union routinely declared dissidents as "mentally ill," and threw them in gulags. The CIA and NSA also generally call whistleblowers and rouge agents "mentally ill," in order to discredit them.
If we can be locked up, because someone has decided that some characteristic, or chronic condition, warrants lifelong lockup, what will the world look like?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/06/woman-with-untreated-...
If I look out at the current incarceration rate and the loosening of marijuana policy, I can see a projected drop in future incarceration. (I’m all for releasing everyone whose only crime is non-violent drug possession or sales.) But we have all these prisons and all these people whose income depends on them being fairly full. That’s a lot of pressure to find other what the private sector would call revenue streams.
Pharma companies created a great fairly novel technique to target specific viruses. You don’t think it’s likely that they’ll create pressure for governments to use that capability to encourage at first and later to force multiple annual flu/other shots? That there won’t be sanctions for non-compliance as there are today for existing inoculations?
(I say this as someone who took a handful of C19 vaccines and gets a flu shot most years. This isn’t an anti-vax rant, but rather exploring the pressures that allowing government too much leeway to restrict individual freedom and violate bodily autonomy has. I don’t want to allow the burden of proof to shift to the individuals to prove the government has ill intent or else submit to a novel, restrictive policy.)
The thing I think you're missing is that I'm not making the point there is never any ill intent from the people involved. Rather, you have to show intent in each case for the slippery slope to apply. In the case of private prisons it's pretty obvious that the organizations involved would like everyone to be incarcerated because there's a pretty clear income stream they can derive from incarcerated persons.
The other thing about "excesses of policy frameworks" is that there will always be excesses no matter which side you err on. What matters is the specific situation and the specific excesses and whether they were intentional or not.
I think in discussion we have to stick to specifics or we risk painting each other with a really broad brush. If you were to engage on a case-by-case basis I would probably say yes or no to slippery slope being a fallacy. Suggesting at the top that I think all applications of slippery slope are fallacious is painting with a broad brush a statement I made about the specific situation.
To bring it back to the original argument(and to paraphrase), I believe that going from "A woman in Tacoma who has been spreading TB and has been refusing reasonable requests to get treatment and to quarantine is being imprisoned" to "public health wants to throw us in the health gulag whenever we're sick and we don't immediately quarantine" seems like a stretch, and there's no evidence of the latter from the former or from any expressed or implied opinions that I've heard. So yes you need more evidence for that slippery slope argument for it not to be fallacious.
So someone noncompliant would be potentially forcefully subdued (probably by police), so that a doctor could then administer them a one-time shot of antiretroviral drugs (without their consent), that would slowly leach into their body over one or several months, treating them all the while. As soon as that single shot is in their body and treating them, they'd be released.
Keep in mind that the goal here wouldn't be to make them HIV-free. Just to get their immune system working long enough to get them COVID-free. They can go back to having HIV if they want; HIV isn't an epidemic risk. So they don't need to be held captive for regular maintenance injections.
Mary Mallon doesn't seem to have been mentally ill, just in denial of the impact of her actions, and so poor that she couldn't afford not to cook.
It seems to be legally sound and hasn't caused a slippery slope since that very famous case.
Source: [1]
The person has an ongoing infection in their body, but seemingly not infecting anyone else, i.e. not infectious.
Looking forward to hearing about the "Ohio variant"... /s
[1] https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665498960063078401
Read the thread. This lineage is not showing signs of community spread.
- "The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life,"
Not a hypothetical. That was the initial reaction of several countries to HIV/AIDS, and Cuba actually implemented it [0].
[0] https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/11/29/are-public-healt...