Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it’s good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.
It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory.
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data?
Good question!
For wastewater the reason is that the municipal treatment plants which provide samples for us have very little to gain and a lot to lose from publicity, so they generally want things like pre-review before publishing data. This means that getting to where the’d be ok with us making the data (or derived data, like variant tracking) public on an ongoing basis is a bit tricky. I do think we can make progress here, but it also hasn’t been a priority.
For nasal swabs the reason is that we are currently doing very little sampling and sequencing: (a) we’re redoing our IRB approval after spinning out from MIT and it’s going slowly, (b) we don’t yet have a protocol that is giving good results, and (c) we aren’t yet sampling anywhere near the number of people you’d need to know what diseases are going around.
when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it’s good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.
It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory.
What’s the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn’t provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?
Good question!
For wastewater the reason is that the municipal treatment plants which provide samples for us have very little to gain and a lot to lose from publicity, so they generally want things like pre-review before publishing data. This means that getting to where the’d be ok with us making the data (or derived data, like variant tracking) public on an ongoing basis is a bit tricky. I do think we can make progress here, but it also hasn’t been a priority.
For nasal swabs the reason is that we are currently doing very little sampling and sequencing: (a) we’re redoing our IRB approval after spinning out from MIT and it’s going slowly, (b) we don’t yet have a protocol that is giving good results, and (c) we aren’t yet sampling anywhere near the number of people you’d need to know what diseases are going around.
The nasal swab sampling data we do have is linked from https://data.securebio.org/sampling-metadata/ as raw reads. The raw wastewater data may or may not be available to researchers depending on how what you want to do interacts with what our partners need: https://naobservatory.org/data