The viral load found in the urban wastewater of Athens shows that there may be 80,000 to 90,000 symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 in the region, said Nikos Thomaidis, professor of analytical chemistry at Athens University.
Speaking to Skai TV on Thursday, Thomaidis clarified that the calculation model is uncertain in terms of absolute numbers, but is reliable in terms of the changes observed in wastewater.
Scientists believe the viral load is likely to lower about 10 days after the strict lockdown has taken effect, which was today.
Professor Thomaidis’ team started analyzing waste samples from the Wastewater Treatment Plant on the islet of Psyttalia last March.
Meanwhile, the National Organization of Public Health (EODY) said it would create a National Network of Sewage Epidemiology, with the aim of monitoring, recording and creating early warnings on the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the community. [kathimerini]
Please tell me nobody is naive enough to think the daily published numbers show the real level of active cases/carriers..
…so this is 1.6 to 1.8 percent of the population? for whom, again, there is a 99.7% survival rate? why again is there any reason to be freaking out?
or maybe it’s about how much these officials have gotten used to sweeping new power with no accountability.
That’s rather like saying there were 3bn people in the world in the 1940s and 99.8% of them didn’t die in concentration camps, so what is the reason for freaking out about those? When you stop averaging out the overall risk and start looking at the risk to more specific sectors of society you get a different picture. I guess you are young and feel safe, but what of the elderly who might have a 10% mortality rate? What about the ability of hospitals to cope if the lid is taken off? That could push up the rate further. Some UK nursing homes have seen more than 30% death rates. Don’t you care about granny and the health workers? What about the emergence of new strains? The fewer limits there are on the scale of the infection, the more mutations will take place – most of them irrelevant but a few of them more contagous, vaccine resistant or deadly.
As for your fear of officials, who are they? Is this a global civil servant plot? Or a global police plot? Or a global politicians plot, with Biden and Putin and Xi and all the other leaders laughing their heads off about how they’ve seized absolute power through a fake-virus plot? You see how your argument crumbles when looked at in the clear light of day?