Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it’s good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.
It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory.
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
It’s unclear to me why the numbers you are report are only absolute numbers. I would expect that there are a bunch of factors that can make the wastewater more or less concentrated and thus have an effect on the reads but that you would want to filter out.
It’s my understanding that when doing influenza vaccines for a session the specific strain of the influenza virus matters a lot. Currently, the dashboard doesn’t seem to answer questions like “How does the dominant Influenza B strain differ today from last year?” and “Did the predictions they make at the beginning this year when they formulated the vaccine for this session actually pick the strains that are now dominant?”
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data?
Good question!
For wastewater the reason is that the municipal treatment plants which provide samples for us have very little to gain and a lot to lose from publicity, so they generally want things like pre-review before publishing data. This means that getting to where the’d be ok with us making the data (or derived data, like variant tracking) public on an ongoing basis is a bit tricky. I do think we can make progress here, but it also hasn’t been a priority.
For nasal swabs the reason is that we are currently doing very little sampling and sequencing: (a) we’re redoing our IRB approval after spinning out from MIT and it’s going slowly, (b) we don’t yet have a protocol that is giving good results, and (c) we aren’t yet sampling anywhere near the number of people you’d need to know what diseases are going around.
when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it’s good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.
It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory.
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
Sorry for being slow (this came out in June) but this data is now linked from our website for the treatment plants that have given permission: https://dholab.github.io/public_viz/001-make-by-city-and-by-virus-dashboards/index.html
It’s unclear to me why the numbers you are report are only absolute numbers. I would expect that there are a bunch of factors that can make the wastewater more or less concentrated and thus have an effect on the reads but that you would want to filter out.
It’s my understanding that when doing influenza vaccines for a session the specific strain of the influenza virus matters a lot. Currently, the dashboard doesn’t seem to answer questions like “How does the dominant Influenza B strain differ today from last year?” and “Did the predictions they make at the beginning this year when they formulated the vaccine for this session actually pick the strains that are now dominant?”
Good question!
For wastewater the reason is that the municipal treatment plants which provide samples for us have very little to gain and a lot to lose from publicity, so they generally want things like pre-review before publishing data. This means that getting to where the’d be ok with us making the data (or derived data, like variant tracking) public on an ongoing basis is a bit tricky. I do think we can make progress here, but it also hasn’t been a priority.
For nasal swabs the reason is that we are currently doing very little sampling and sequencing: (a) we’re redoing our IRB approval after spinning out from MIT and it’s going slowly, (b) we don’t yet have a protocol that is giving good results, and (c) we aren’t yet sampling anywhere near the number of people you’d need to know what diseases are going around.
The nasal swab sampling data we do have is linked from https://data.securebio.org/sampling-metadata/ as raw reads. The raw wastewater data may or may not be available to researchers depending on how what you want to do interacts with what our partners need: https://naobservatory.org/data