I do think this is a useful comparison, but if you want to be able to detect something before ~0.05% of the people in any region are infected you need to scale up by a lot more than a factor of 20 ;) The issue is that (a) you’ll get up 0.05% in some region far before you get to 0.05% globally and (b) the detection system samples only some sewersheds and so in the likely futures where pandemic does not start in a monitored sewershed the global incidence is higher than the incidence you can measure.
Personally, I’m skeptical that with current or near future technology and costs we will see sufficiently widespread monitoring to provide the initial identification of a non-stealth pathogen: BOTECing it, you need a truly huge system.
EDIT: rereading the post, the initial version wasn’t clear enough that this was an estimate of what it would cost to flag a pandemic before a specific fraction of people in the monitored sewersheds had been infected. Edited the post to bring this limitation up into the summary.
I do think this is a useful comparison, but if you want to be able to detect something before ~0.05% of the people in any region are infected you need to scale up by a lot more than a factor of 20 ;) The issue is that (a) you’ll get up 0.05% in some region far before you get to 0.05% globally and (b) the detection system samples only some sewersheds and so in the likely futures where pandemic does not start in a monitored sewershed the global incidence is higher than the incidence you can measure.
Personally, I’m skeptical that with current or near future technology and costs we will see sufficiently widespread monitoring to provide the initial identification of a non-stealth pathogen: BOTECing it, you need a truly huge system.
EDIT: rereading the post, the initial version wasn’t clear enough that this was an estimate of what it would cost to flag a pandemic before a specific fraction of people in the monitored sewersheds had been infected. Edited the post to bring this limitation up into the summary.