Scientists traced a mysterious Covid case back to six toilets

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/22/1090059/how-scientists-traced-a-mysterious-covid-case-back-to-six-toilets/

by cachecrab • 2 years ago

108 46 2 years ago

technologyreview.com

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324201541/https://www.techn...

banana_giraffe• 2 years ago

Freakanomics recently did an episode on this:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/water-water-everywhere-but-...

greazy• 2 years ago

And the preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.28.22281553v...

Edit: this pre print is from more than a year ago! It was just published in Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

jna_sh• 2 years ago

I was really hoping this would be the Ohio cryptic lineage, which was being tracked by the same team https://x.com/SolidEvidence/status/1665444603829407746?s=20

BrandonMarc• 2 years ago

Rather abrupt end to the article. Lots of ethical questions left unanswered .... which i guess is the point.

flybrand• 2 years ago

could it mean that the massive covid infection in the gut didn’t show up on a nasal swab?

Shouldn’t they have known that beforehand? Isn’t that a big red flag in this entire endeavor?

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 years ago

Covid is supposedly a respiratory tract infection, so who'd be expecting it to only show up in the gut? It seems they still don't know whether that is in fact the explanation.

Ovah• 2 years ago

It's been published since roughly May 2020 that COVID infects gut epithelium. It's not much of a stretch that it's transmissible that way as well.

mschuster914• 2 years ago

Covid is supposedly a respiratory tract infection, so who'd be expecting it to only show up in the gut?

That's the thing with SARS-CoV-2.

It's primarily transmitted by aerosols, but it has also been shown to be transmitted via smearing. It's primarily a respiratory tract infection, but it has also been shown to have intestinal, cardiovascular and neurological impact as well as persistence in these tissues [1].

And yet, despite 7 millions of people dead and dozens of millions of people suffering from long covid, there's almost no prevention mechanisms in force anywhere on this planet, even vaccine development and rollout have all but ground to a halt. It's like we learned nothing at all from the pandemic, our politicians just wanted to make it go away by pretending it went away.

[1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/86015

rain_iwakura4• 2 years ago

I'm honestly of the opinion that all of the ethical questions that arose during this search are fairly minuscule compared to the potential findings that could help us end this never-ending outbreak altogether. (At least by developing better targets for drugs like Paxlovid, if their hypothesis about GI tract replication turns out to be correct.)

Of them all the potential to reveal that the patient X is hiding their HIV status is probably the biggest tragedy that can happen, since it will compromise their social and work standing due to stigma. If, however, this person does NOT know they have HIV or something similarly immunocompromising, it's in fact their moral prerogative to find this person and inform them of their disease, instead of beating around the bush trying to go easy on their feelings instead of potentially saving their life.

Either way, at some point it becomes a question of common-good vs individual good and these options aren't so bad to even have this debate.

nradov• 2 years ago

There is nothing that can help us "end" the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak. A highly infectious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs can't be eradicated or even really contained. At this point it's just one more of several endemic human coronaviruses and will always be around in some variants, much like HCoV-OC43.

mschuster914• 2 years ago

There is nothing that can help us "end" the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak.

We could massively mitigate its effects to the point we could actually live with the virus without risking the often debilitating effects it can have.

On a societal/systemic level: HEPA air filters in hospitals, care homes, public transport, schools, churches, generally any indoors place where large amounts of people gather would not just drastically cut down on transmission of pathogens of all kind, but also make the lives of people suffering from allergies so much easier. We put a lot of care into regulating our food, water, even our clothing to be free of pathogens and contaminants - but the air we breathe daily is barely regulated at all!

On an individual level, we could wash our goddamn hands more often (I'd be really interested in, but probably also really disgusted by a study on soap and towel consumption in large office buildings before, during and after the pandemic), wear masks in public transport, and stay the fuck home when sick - although I realize that this is all but impossible in the US with there not being a federal law that allows people to stay home when sick with anything without risking of getting fired. Here in Germany, it's no big deal.

Instead, our politicians seem to have completely given up any idea of dealing with covid.

rain_iwakura4• 2 years ago

I think you misread what I said. I said "could help us" which just implies it's a distant possibility. I am aware that it's an extremely low probability event, but not an impossible one, for example in 200 years they might find a universal beta coronavirus vaccine based on a general stem and not on a variant specific spike.

More information in this case is better outcomes regardless. We can't just accept the current state of affairs and do nothing if there are still avenues of improvement that don't involve pretending like COVID is a mild disease or forcing quarantines whenever some worse variants shows up.

Whether it will jump back from deer or dogs (two animals aside from minks who i remember testing positive for sars-cov-2) back to humans is a huge if (hasn't happened so far as far as I remember, or if it did, it couldn't have been more than ballpark ~5 cases), but I don't disagree that it might happen once more, since I'm not a lab leak guy.

lamontcg• 2 years ago

could help us end this never-ending outbreak altogether.

it has jumped to so many other species where it has established reservoirs that it'll never be gone.

this virus is going to be with the human race for at least the next hundred years.

it may very well spill back from other species into new pandemics (although those pandemics are likely to look more like the 2009 swine flu pandemic since everyone will have cross reactive T-cells).

there's nothing we do to stop this with any known or really plausibly imagined technology.

even if you could snap your fingers and wipe it out of the human race, then the problem is that the longer it goes with humans not establishing immunity to it, the worse the pandemic will be when it jumps back from the deer or mice or whatever (although that likely wouldn't take very long at all).

rain_iwakura4• 2 years ago

my point was not to make it disappear, but to develop better targets for antivirals, which effectively make it end by just shortening the disease course to 1-2 days. Right now, the rebounds that happen are mostly due to virus reservoirs within the body that aren't completely eradicated by 5 day course. More effective targeting within the body could be key. Either way, saying "nothing can be done" and just throwing in the towel when valuable info could be obtained is not the way to go. Personally, I have a general interest in the virus (though I'd never work as a virologist due to my germaphobia) so I think it's worth investigating for its own sake.

Projectiboga• 2 years ago

94 and 95 masks and true Hepa filters are the best methods vs COVID. Hepa helps a lot against all respiratory viruses to slow spread in families, workplaces and communal spaces.

reaperman• 2 years ago

What are "94 masks"?

abracadaniel• 2 years ago

KF94 from Korea.

senectus1• 2 years ago

always close the toilet lid before you flush... https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/indiatoday/2022-12/ezgif-3-...

kelseyfrog3• 2 years ago

I must be missing something. There was only one line back to the restroom? Shouldn't there be another trail back to their residence? Or is there a person who only poops at work?

kenny11• 2 years ago

They could live outside the city where they would be connected to a local septic system instead of a central city sewer.

kelseyfrog3• 2 years ago

That's a good point! I knew there was an edge case I was missing

animal531• 2 years ago

Pooping only at work (or at home) is perfectly reasonable for people with regular bowel movements that go at roughly the same time every day.

kelseyfrog3• 2 years ago

How does that work with weekends? hold it?

may_mccheese• 2 years ago

The person who did this study is actually YC '2025! Developing what is called "smart pipes" to trace these types of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

Scientists traced a mysterious Covid case back to six toilets

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