By JOHN E. PEARSON
Los Alamos
The county is paying biobot to monitor our waste water for covid. https://biobot.io/data/#county-35028
Biobot tracks the amount of covid in the water and sequences it to track the prevalence of the circulating strains. Biobots variant prevalences are highly discrepant with the CDC’s Region 6 variant prevalences?
Indeed the primary variants circulating in Region 6 are BF and BQ, which Biobot does not appear to be tracking anywhere. At least I couldn’t find any state where Biobot reported the BF and BQ variants.
The CDC data can be seen by selecting Region 6 at the CDC. The fact that the variants are so distant from reality makes me wonder about the validity of the viral load data as well.
BQ and BF are sublineages of BA5. In the cdc’s variant page they are listing BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 and BF.7 separately from BA5 but are aggregating the other BQ and BF variants in with their BA5 prevalence figures. I personally think it would be nice if Biobot included the sub variants that are dominant separately as done by other organizations doing this monitoring. Basically this is a non-story.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LdGEpH8AAAAJ&hl=en
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