Water Sector News
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Tracking Bay Area COVID-19 through wastewater testing
With the expiration of the U.S. COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, some data collection efforts concerning the coronavirus have stopped. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, no longer tracks data on daily new infections nor publishes its color-coded reports on community spread. Instead, the agency has shifted its surveillance efforts to monitoring weekly coronavirus-positive hospital admissions and deaths.
But there’s another tool used by the CDC to watch for local outbreaks that has become increasingly important: wastewater surveillance. As more people rely on home test kits and fewer on official tests that are tallied by health departments, analyzing the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in sewage has become a crucial means of spotting trends. Since COVID-19 can be detected in feces regardless of symptoms or what kind of diagnostic tests are being used, researchers can take samples of effluent in different sewersheds to accurately analyze COVID-19 concentrations in the community.