I think it's wrong to assess the impact of XBB by comparing national wastewater levels to national XBB percentage, when the distribution of measurements of each is so far from uniform. Better to focus on wastewater patterns from a few locations where XBB is high to make that assessment. Indiana wastewater isn't telling us anything about XBB so far. It's weird how local presentation of the same biobot data can look so different. It surprises me to see that Biobot doesn't have any data from NY. According to Biobot XBB isn't as high as I would have expected in Massachusetts, although they've had some pretty high wastewater levels relative to recent waves https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm . So I'm not sure where to look for a true assessment of XBB. It seems like a small data error made it seem like XBB was taking off more than it actually is, and people panicked because of that?
If you look county-by-county at the Biobot dashboard there are a lot of counties with a high proportion (80-90%+) of samples being XBB. With a few exceptions, these counties haven't shown a significant rise in wastewater concentration. Taken together that's pretty strong evidence that XBB isn't causing a significant rise in infections (otherwise wastewater levels would be high/rising).
I think the issue is that whenever a new variant arises that out-competes the previous one, it (naturally) grows rapidly from a small proportion of all infections to a large proportion. For those that don't think about what proportions represent or what's going on with the math (or perhaps they have an incentive to hype up attention) that transition can appear alarming. But a growing PROPORTION of cases becoming a new variant in no way implies there are or will be more INFECTIONS than before.
When you look at the pattern of which counties in Indiana have high XBB and which don’t, do you believe those numbers? That geographic distribution is just not plausible. It doesn’t make too much sense that the proportion of XBB would shoot up dramatically in some places, but rise gradually in places like Boston, unless they’re facing truly different kinds of competition, and we don’t seem to have evidence of that between there and Dubois county, for example.
I think it's wrong to assess the impact of XBB by comparing national wastewater levels to national XBB percentage, when the distribution of measurements of each is so far from uniform. Better to focus on wastewater patterns from a few locations where XBB is high to make that assessment. Indiana wastewater isn't telling us anything about XBB so far. It's weird how local presentation of the same biobot data can look so different. It surprises me to see that Biobot doesn't have any data from NY. According to Biobot XBB isn't as high as I would have expected in Massachusetts, although they've had some pretty high wastewater levels relative to recent waves https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm . So I'm not sure where to look for a true assessment of XBB. It seems like a small data error made it seem like XBB was taking off more than it actually is, and people panicked because of that?
If you look county-by-county at the Biobot dashboard there are a lot of counties with a high proportion (80-90%+) of samples being XBB. With a few exceptions, these counties haven't shown a significant rise in wastewater concentration. Taken together that's pretty strong evidence that XBB isn't causing a significant rise in infections (otherwise wastewater levels would be high/rising).
I think the issue is that whenever a new variant arises that out-competes the previous one, it (naturally) grows rapidly from a small proportion of all infections to a large proportion. For those that don't think about what proportions represent or what's going on with the math (or perhaps they have an incentive to hype up attention) that transition can appear alarming. But a growing PROPORTION of cases becoming a new variant in no way implies there are or will be more INFECTIONS than before.
When you look at the pattern of which counties in Indiana have high XBB and which don’t, do you believe those numbers? That geographic distribution is just not plausible. It doesn’t make too much sense that the proportion of XBB would shoot up dramatically in some places, but rise gradually in places like Boston, unless they’re facing truly different kinds of competition, and we don’t seem to have evidence of that between there and Dubois county, for example.