“Sample Prevalence vs Global Prevalence” by Jeff Kaufman

Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. Thanks to Evan Fields and Mike McLaren for editorial feedback on this post. In Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing we have: our best guess is that if this system were deployed at the scale of approximately $1.5M/y it could detect something genetically engineered that shed like SARS-CoV-2 before 0.2% of people in the monitored sewersheds had been infected. I want to focus on the last bit: "in the monitored sewersheds". The idea is, if a system like this is tracking wastewater from New York City, its ability to raise an alert for a new pandemic will depend on how far along that pandemic is in that particular city. This is closely related to another question: what fraction of the global population would have to be infected before it could raise an alert? There are two [...] --- First published: July 8th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NHZ3HWz5tkzsoBq9Y/sample-prevalance-vs-global-prevalence --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.