Please read the thread. They're not tracking a particular individual; if they were capable of doing that, they would have reached out to the individual and there wouldn't be a thread at all.
The lineage in just two sewersheds. The sequence drifts over time, but the sequence in the two sewersheds drift together. If it were multiple people the sequence would form distinct branches. We don't have proof it's one person, but it is the most likely explanation.
I did read the thread and I understand it. The fact that they were able to narrow it down to one building with only 30 people means that it is definitely not many would consider to be anonymous.
From a news article in the thread:
“We started tracking it,” Johnson said. “So, we started from the main treatment plant of over 100,000 people, and sort of like checked all the lines. And all of them, only one of the lines had the lineage. And so we would just keep going — checking… all of the pieces of the web, figuring out– following it up, up the line until we got to a single manhole. That manhole actually only got waste from one place, which was a company (that) had about 30 employees.”
my point is valid. They are able to do quite a bit of tracking through wastewater. That removes most of the anonymity.
Until he or she is not, and then they will be associated with all this discussion of their GI tract on the Internet.
This is deeply gross, and the researcher should rethink his/her approach to patient care. This is not a cool puzzle. This is a human being, who is just trying to live their life without being doxed by their poop.
