Via a pilot project in Rheinland-Pfalz, health authorities contemplate a new programme to survey German shit in perpetuity for Covid as part of a virus "early warning system"

Will no one rid us of these turbulent testers?

I fear that they will just never, ever, ever stop testing:

Scientists in Rhineland-Pfalz are considering the transition from the pandemic to the endemic stage with a study on wastewater surveys for Corona. “We’re the only federal state in Germany that’s doing wastewater analyses accompanied with a survey,” said state vaccination coordinator Daniel Stich (SPD) in Mainz. “Right now, therefore, Rhineland-Pfalz is positioning itself for possible future pandemics.” …

Samples are taken twice a week at 15 sewage treatment plants in the state and tested for the Covid and its current variants. In addition, almost 7,500 people in the state’s five major centres take a Covid rapid test twice a week, says Professor Karl-Heinz Küfer of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial and Mathematical Methods (ITWM) in Kaiserslautern. …

Other German states have already expressed interest [in the project]…

The effort is scheduled to run to the end of the year and will cost 2.5 million Euros. Those involved hint darkly that any future programme growing out of the trial might survey for other respiratory viruses as well, such as RSV and influenza. Thus the press will always have something to panic about.

At the end there’s this funny bit:

“This is a smart, easily scalable model,” said immunisation coordinator Stich. Additionally, he noted that it’s a good alternative to mass testing for no purpose, as was done with Corona. These tests were never statistically representative and usually significantly underestimated the incidence, said Küfer. In addition, as in the case of testing at schools and kindergartens, they gave rise to false assumptions, such as test results from schools and childcare centres. “The children did not infect their parents as often as we believed.”

Finally, now that it doesn’t matter anymore, we can admit that mass testing was completely idiotic and failed to detect the overwhelming majority of infections. Maybe someday it will even occur to a journalist to ask why we poured all those billions of Euros into that emptying-the-ocean-via-teaspoon exercise known as contact tracing. Note also how politically toxic school closures have become, such that the idea of returning to mass testing in schools is basically unthinkable.

Otherwise: I regret to report that, while the grab-bag of vague fibromyalgic symptoms reported primarily by middle-aged women to be sequelae of SARS-2 infection is illusory, Long Covid is all too real. It’ll be different in each of our countries, but our insane policies have conjured into being a whole world of virus pests who will spend the next decades carefully sniffing our shit and Feigl-Dinging every winter from now until the next world war. Public exhaustion with pandemic measures will limit their influence for a while, but they’re patient and methodical, and they’ll always be pressing. It would be great to have politicians and parties committed explicitly to defunding all of these lunatics, before they cause another mass hysteria.