Marc Johnson

Do you think you've had long-term GI problems since having Covid? We are performing a study examining the characteristics of viruses, specifically persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections, in stool samples. 1/3

FYI, we haven't seen any Hantavirus in US wastewater, but we'll be watching for it. who.int/emergencies/di…

@EscoboomVanilla I wanted units my audience would understand.

@SolidEvidence Please - no feetsies, handegg fields, King's bananas or whatever. Metric units only. Especially if it's important or serious.

This is crazy. Imagine a hole the size of a football field that is 700 feet deep. Now fill it up with wastewater, and remove a tablespoon. That was our starting material for this study. 1/

@veggiequeen420 @DavosSafety @mryoung151 Perspective.

@DavosSafety @SolidEvidence @mryoung151 I’ll volunteer now! I love his work, just don’t love the data centers draining my state of water and poisoning folk

collaboration with @SecureBio

Kind of mind boggling, isn’t it? 3/3

@AltenbergLee @ecogwendoc @Nucleocapsoid The thing that matters most is the selective pressure. There are certain mutations that are selected for in cryptics (individuals) that occur two-thirds of the time. It doesn't matter how few people it is if the pressure is high enough.

@ecogwendoc @Nucleocapsoid @SolidEvidence Yes—when comparing evolutionary rates under natural selection, one can't use only time, one has to use total mutational exploration of sequence space, and that scales linearly with total infections.

BA.3.2 is strange is so many ways. It's now 17 months old, which is really quite old for a COVID lineage. Every so often there is a sweeping lineage that displaces everything in circulation, but when that doesn't happen the existing 'clans' fight it out with each other. 1/

This week's BA.3.2 detections from wastewater. The numerator is the number of samples where it was detected, but it wasn't necessarily the only lineage detected. Still focused on the NorthEast.

As I have said before. There are 3 things left that most Americans have a favorable opinion of: rockets to the moon, Dolly Parton, and wastewater testing. postandcourier.com/news/local_sta…

@AltenbergLee Better

@SolidEvidence By what mutational mechanism are those insertions happening?

@DawnAllsun But we don't know if they have BA.3.2. I'm just saying that there are things about this lineage that are different and don't make complete sense yet.

@SolidEvidence SOME adult infections may be asymptomatic due to consistent vaccine use, but I'm still seeing lots of people hospitalized, and sick (but calling it a cold or flu).

@CovidSolidarit1 presumably.

@SolidEvidence Would asymptomatic infections not be detectable in wastewater?

@vickersty Fair point, although the 2 lineages were present pretty much out of the starting gate. Kind of like with BA.1 and BA.2.

@SolidEvidence Weren't these added in BA.3.2.2? BA.3.2.2Alias of B.1.1.529.3.2.2, S:K356T, S:A575S

@questions77 Usually you can tell persistent infections because of the anachronistic sequence, but with a lineage that has hardly changed it is harder to tell.

@SolidEvidence Could people with persistent infections or reservoir conditions be raising the wastewater signal levels? I got better on 15 days Paxlovid and believe I had not cleared the infection.

@picapiruli That's my point. I see tons of it in wastewater.

@SolidEvidence Asymptomatic infections would appear in the wastewater as ppl are still infectious! It makes no sense to me 💁🏻‍♀️

@KayElleTweets No, we see tons in wastewater. Much more wastewater detection than patient, but there is hardly any sequencing done with patients anymore.

@SolidEvidence Is there a chance BA.3.2 has less (or no) GI 💩viral load shedding?

@Nucleocapsoid @gwladwr Specifics about severity are so hard to come by. Do you know of any datasets that include info about severity?

@gwladwr @SolidEvidence COULD be right im suggesting there's been major wave of *really* low-symptom BA.3.2 infections, with only unlucky minority severely sickened, but would require "infection dichotomy" where BA.3.2 was 'extra mild' in most, yet still SEVERE in significant minority.

AFAIK, at no point in UK has GP sentinel swabbing suggested a really high prevalence of BA.3.2 infection which might *underlie* Emergency Department child (1-14) waves. Unclear if this is because of sampling bias, or if it means BA.3.2 is aypically serious in susceptible kids?

@ChristosArgyrop That is also true, but numerous cryptics have shown us that you can completely escape antibodies without sacrificing receptor binding strength.

@SolidEvidence If it doesn't bind well to the receptor, maybe the antibodies don't bind well to its RBD

@AltenbergLee Figure is misleading, I should change it. They aren't insertions, it just isn't listing the parent residue.