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betsy ladyzhets 📊
@betsyladyzhets.bsky.social
editor/co-founder @thesicktimes.bsky.social & freelance science/health journalist | she/her/🏳️‍🌈| betsy@thesicktimes.org thesicktimes.org/
2.1k followers155 following266 posts
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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

I'm really honored to be featured on Death Panel talking about my wastewater reporting and our work at The Sick Times!

DPdeathpanel.bsky.social

In our latest, @betsyladyzhets.bsky.social of @thesicktimes.bsky.social joins us to discuss what wastewater data does—and doesn’t—tell us about covid spread, and how the rise of wastewater data fits inside the larger picture of the privatization of covid risk on.soundcloud.com/8Md1VGD1nhUG...

The Promise and Perils of Wastewater Data w/ Betsy Ladyzhets (08/29/24)
The Promise and Perils of Wastewater Data w/ Betsy Ladyzhets (08/29/24)

Beatrice speaks with Betsy Ladyzhets of The Sick Times about what wastewater surveillance does—and doesn’t—tell us about the level of covid spread and how the rise of covid wastewater monitoring fits

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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

Tomorrow, I'll be interviewing NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli for @thesicktimes.bsky.social#LongCovid & related diseases. Long Covid community, what questions do you have for Dr. Bertagnolli? Reply here or email me!

Graphic with a blue background, with speech bubbles showing question marks Text reads: The Sick Times Long Covid Questions for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? Ask them in the comments or email Betsy at betsy@thesicktimes.org
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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

Also today @thesicktimes.bsky.socialthesicktimes.org/2024/08/06/d...

Double trouble: Hypermobility may increase Long Covid risk - The Sick Times
Double trouble: Hypermobility may increase Long Covid risk - The Sick Times

“For a middle-aged woman who hasn’t had any actual injuries, I’ve had a huge amount of physical therapy,” says Liza DiLeo Thomas, a 52-year-old emergency medicine doctor in New Orleans and mom to five...

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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

Today @thesicktimes.bsky.socialthesicktimes.org/2024/08/06/s...

Sen. Bernie Sanders introduces $10 billion Long Covid Moonshot legislation to support research, healthcare, education - The Sick Times
Sen. Bernie Sanders introduces $10 billion Long Covid Moonshot legislation to support research, healthcare, education - The Sick Times

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the Long Covid Research Moonshot Act of 2024. The bill allocates $1 billion in federal funding per year for the next 10 years for Long Covid research, treatme...

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Reposted by betsy ladyzhets 📊
TSthesicktimes.bsky.social

Wastewater surveillance is a key remaining metric for tracking Covid-19 spread. @betsyladyzhets.bsky.social#LongCovidbit.ly/3zPkhCY

graphic reads, “Wastewater surveillance for Covid-19 keeps evolving. Here’s what you need to know. By Betsy Ladyzhets.” The graphic features workers testing wastewater in reflective vests.
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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

Today @thesicktimes.bsky.socialthesicktimes.org/2024/07/23/w...

Wastewater surveillance for Covid-19 keeps evolving. Here’s what you need to know. - The Sick Times
Wastewater surveillance for Covid-19 keeps evolving. Here’s what you need to know. - The Sick Times

As governments have scaled back their tracking of Covid-19 — even as the pandemic continues — many people who still take precautions have increasingly relied on wastewater surveillance to follow disea...

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Reposted by betsy ladyzhets 📊
TSthesicktimes.bsky.social

The Sick Times co-founders @mileswgriffis.bsky.social@betsyladyzhets.bsky.social#LongCovidnura-community.com

A blue and green gradient-colored slide reads: The Sick Times + NURA Community. Friday, July 26 2:00 pm EDT. Join us for a behind-the-scenes view into Long Covid journalism. What goes into a science news story. Covering research news, policies, healthcare issues. How to interview scientists and people with lived experience. Editing and fact-checking. Writing for The Sick Times.” The graphic also features black and white photos of Miles and Betsy wearing respirators.
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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

There are many! coviddatadispatch.com/wastewater-s... (with the caveat that this was last updated in November and may be a bit out of date)

Wastewater surveillance data in the U.S. - COVID-19 Data Dispatch
Wastewater surveillance data in the U.S. - COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Here are the major data sources for wastewater surveillance data in the United States. We’ve included government sources and research/academic dashboards. The page is split into two tables: national s...

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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

Sharing a relevant section from a story I did for Nature earlier this year that discusses this issue -- www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Interpreting poo In December 2023 and January 2024, it was clear that COVID-19 was spreading widely in several parts of the world. But public-health agencies had severely cut back on conventional testing and surveillance programmes, leading to uncertainty about how much the coronavirus was spreading, and a sudden focus on wastewater-based epidemiology. Some scientists and social-media commentators stated that SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater correlated with specific case numbers, estimating huge surges in the United States and Europe. But others cautioned that wastewater surveillance is not reliable enough to predict true infection numbers. There’s a “false...
sense of precision” in such estimates, says Sam Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who has worked on COVID-19 data systems. Estimates are difficult to make because the sewage data differ considerably from conventional health indicators. In typical surveillance, data represent individual infected people who can be identified through contact tracing, isolated and treated. In wastewater surveillance operations, data can represent entire communities. They make “a litre represent a million people”, says Douglas Manuel, a public-health physician at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Manuel and his colleagues have identified several variables that can alter results from such screenings; these include population density, precipitation, sample composition, handling and testing methods and quality-control measures4. For example, as snow melts in Ottawa’s spring, it flows into the wastewater system and “scours out” solid waste...
To account for those variables, researchers tend to compare measurements from one site over time. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, developed a metric called the wastewater viral activity level that compares a testing site’s recent SARS-CoV-2 measurement to past ones, then averages those comparison values across larger regions. These comparison metrics can be helpful for presenting wastewater results to the public, but they gloss over the data’s complexity. Bilge Kocamemi, an environmental engineer at Marmara University in Istanbul and a project coordinator for Turkey’s wastewater testing, says that she quickly realized that “scientific representation of the data makes the data unusable for the public”. Instead, she and her colleagues developed a relatively simple COVID-19 map: testing sites are displayed in different shades of yellow and green, depending on how high SARS-CoV-2 levels are. This coloured scale is not precise, Kocamemi says, but...
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BLbetsyladyzhets.bsky.social

I have great respect for the work Hoerger does, but would take his estimates with a big grain of salt. Wastewater experts I've talked to are pretty skeptical about this work b/c there's still a lot we don't know about how viral levels in sewage correlate to illness in the community.

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betsy ladyzhets 📊
@betsyladyzhets.bsky.social
editor/co-founder @thesicktimes.bsky.social & freelance science/health journalist | she/her/🏳️‍🌈| betsy@thesicktimes.org thesicktimes.org/
2.1k followers155 following266 posts
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