May 27, 2020

Sewage Sludge Can Be an Early Warning of Coronavirus

Last year I wrote about how the testing of sewage sludge in Flint could shed light on the evolution of lead levels in its water. But it turns out that sewage sludge can do more: you can test the sludge for coronavirus too. A team of Yale researchers did this in New Haven and came up with this:

The red line shows the concentration of coronavirus in sewage sludge. The black line shows the number of new COVID-19 cases. It’s a perfect fit with a lag of about one week.

It’s not clear how useful this result is, but anything that gives an early warning of coronavirus infections allows public health officials a head start on countermeasures. It won’t stop the spike in cases, but it might reduce the length of the spike if countermeasures are put in place a week earlier than they otherwise would.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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