I've always found this frustrating.
You or your child has a respiratory infection. It's not flu or COVID. Your doctor can only tell you, 'you have a virus'.
Could it be a little bit more specific?
We hope to help answer this question, non-invasively, and for free.
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Contrary to my prior assumptions, many of the most common pathogens are not everywhere, all the time. They occur in discrete waves, often nationwide.
I wrote about this recently with Rhinoviruses, the most frequent cause of the common cold.
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As promised, we've now added a standalone readout of the rhinoviruses on our wastewater dashboard.
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lungfish-science.github.io/wastewater-das…
We debated how to best display this. There are over 100 rhinovirus serotypes, and we wanted to display their prevalence over space and time. Too many dimensions.
This was our first stab at it.
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First, we only listed the serotypes that have appeared in at least 4 consecutive samples.
They are ordered based on when they first appeared in 4 consecutive samples.
Time goes left to right, starting in 2024. Larger circles mean more of that serotype detected.
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In the legend you can toggle the different sewersheds we are reporting (hopefully adding more soon).
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The rhinoviruses have been most prevalent in late Spring, and most of the prevalent serotypes in Columbia last year are not prevalent this year.
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And if you look at the other locations, most of the serotypes prevalent in Columbia this year were prevalent everywhere.
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This is fascinating. Although the rhinoviruses were usually surging in Spring, there was an outbreak of C42 in Fall of last year and it occurred in every one of the sewersheds coast-to-coast.
Who knew?
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That's it for now. We continue to recruit more sewersheds in partnership with @SecureBio.
More updates to come.
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