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+--- Thread: "Close contact" (/thread-239.html)
"Close contact" - M_T - 06-22-2022
I had a co-worker notify me last night (Tuesday) that they tested positive for COVID. Â I had actually seen him about 1.5 hours earlier. Â I spent several hours in a suite of rooms he had been in earlier in the day. Â I was in an hour long meeting 5 days before his test, and had seen him briefly four days before.
What bothers me is that, as of 24 hours later, my company has not notified me that I might have been exposed.
It struck me that the CDC's "close contact" dates from the early days of COVID -- when the CDC insisted that COVID was spread by droplets, not aerosols; when the CDC didn't even recommend masks, much less respirators.
By not notifying me, I believe the company is complicit in allowing the disease to spread. Â And, I put the blame for that squarely on the stuck-in-the-mud CDC. Â By sticking to, and allowing to persist in the public, early COVID misconceptions, the public is being harmed.
One can no longer trust the self-reported number of cases. Â IMO, only two numbers can be trusted:
 1) The rate of COVID in any fully tested subset of the community.  Unfortunately, such numbers aren't published.  What is published, and is close, is the number of COVID cases in newly hospitalized patients.  I believe all newly hospitalized patients are tested.  If we knew the number hospitalized (which I don't), we could estimate the infection rate in the general population.
 2) Sewage levels.  There's no getting around it.  If someone has COVID, they will impact the amount of COVID found in sewage.
Unfortunately, there isn't a correlation that says "Level X in sewage corresponds to an infection level of Y%" Â But you can compare sewage levels in June versus sewage levels in January. Â In my community, sewage levels show the infection rate in the general population is as high as the peak of Omicron.
  Odd - Biobot's national levels don't show a current peak, but when you look at the communities they measure, at least a third show such a peak.  (They don't include my community's levels.)
RE: "Close contact" - Hurlburt88 - 06-26-2022
feels to me like sewage levels are simplest and most direct at this point, even if they don't clearly indicate a % infection level;Â I assume as variants evolve sewage levels per infected person may evolve also.