MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WBOY) — On Tuesday Senator Joe Manchin announced a $930k grant to fund a mobile wastewater testing lab at West Virginia University that will be used to test for evidence of infectious diseases in local communities.

Dr. Gordon Smith, a WVU professor involved in the project, says wastewater testing for COVID-19 has already been going on for the last two years.

When people are infected with a virus, in this case, COVID-19, the inactive viral material can be detected in the wastewater of communities where the virus is starting to spread. This practice is becoming more and more important for early outbreak detection, as the city of New York found out on Friday.