I remember during the tail end of the pandemic someone posted a link to a big spike in wastewater COVID testing in our city's sewers. So I decided to pay close attention to the COVID test rates/hospitalizations for the next 2 months. But I never ended up seeing any correlation. The trendline stayed stagnant, before declining as it did everywhere else.
I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.
Depending on when/where that was during the pandemic,
unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless,
and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors).
Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard...
...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem.
I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.