wastewater and Sars-Cov-2

  11-1-20   “When the number of COVID-19-positive samples in sewage goes up, 3 to 7 days later, the number of reported cases go up.”…And on August 7, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated the detection of non-infective RNA fragments of SARS-CoV-2 in untreated wastewater and/or sludge has been reported in a number of settings, such as Milan, Italy; Murcia, Spain; Brisbane, Australia; multiple locations in the Netherlands; and in Paris, France.  https://www.coronavirustoday.com/searching-coronavirus-clues-researchers-turn%C2%A0-sewer

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7-7-20  Particles of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, were found in the sewage samples of the city of Florianopolis, in the south of Brazil, on November 27, 2019, two months before the first clinical case was reported in Brazil….the virus found on November 27 was very low: only 100,000 copies of the virus genome per litre. After that, new samples tested positive in higher doses on December 11 and February 20, until on March 4 the load of SARS-CoV-2 reached one million genome copies per litre of sewage.” However, on October 30 and November 6, the samples showed no trace of SARS-CoV-2.  https://smartwatermagazine.com/news/smart-water-magazine/brazil-finds-coronavirus-sewage-sample-november-2019

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8-15-20   Our results demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in northern Italy at the end of 2019.  Moreover it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously, which changes our previous understanding of the geographical circulation of the virus in Italy.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

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10-4-2011  At this time about 3,000 different viruses are recognized, but metagenomic studies suggest that these viruses are a small fraction of the viruses that exist in nature….untreated wastewater the most diverse viral metagenome (genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples) examined thus far.  However the vast majority of sequence reads bore little or no sequence relation to known viruses and thus could not be placed into specific taxa.  These results show that the vast majority of the viruses on Earth have not yet been characterized. …Deep sequencing of virion-associated nucleic acids suggests the presence of large numbers of uncharacterized viruses.  https://mbio.asm.org/content/2/5/e00180-11

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10-28-20   Fifty percent of mink farms are in Europe, and the rest are dispersed throughout the world, in North America and countries such as Argentina, China and Russia.3 At facilities where minks are bred and slaughtered for fur, workers usually breed female minks once a year. There are about three or four surviving kittens in each litter, and they are killed when they are about 6 months old, depending on what country they are in, after the first hard freeze.  Minks used for breeding are kept for four to five years.4 The animals—who are housed in unbearably small cages--live with fear, stress, disease, parasites, and other physical and psychological hardships, all for the sake of an unnecessary global industry that makes billions of dollars annually.  https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/animals-used-clothing-factsheets/inside-fur-industry-factory-farms/