Yeah, there’s an important difference between having covid and having covid with no herd immunity.
I caught covid during the pandemic, it was around a month after receiving the vaccine. So actually I never even got a fever. I had like a day of cold symptoms, never even showed positive on lateral flow.
But since my girlfriend did test positive, as per the rules here at the time, I did a proper lab test. That confirmed that yes I had covid at the time or close to when I had the test.
So at the very height of the immunity provided by the vaccine I still technically caught the virus. Which makes sense.
So, with the general increase in immunity there can be a lot of covid detected in wastewater, but many or most of those people putting that waste out may only be having cold level symptoms.
I’m not really downplaying the virus. Just saying that’s there’s a very big difference between contracting the virus now when most people have acquired various levels of immunity and for most it will be much less of a serious infection than it would be at the start when we had no real immunity to speak of, which caused much longer drawn out infections that were far more likely to result in hospital stays.