Water Sector News
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Want to Unravel Some Big Covid Mysteries? Check the Wastewater
Studies of wastewater have turned up one of the weirdest observations yet about Covid. Most of the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is happening within a small fraction of infected people who, for some reason, don’t clear the virus for months on end. These persistent infections could be a clue to the way new variants emerge, what causes long Covid and even how the virus got into humans in the first place.
The story of these persistent infections is written in sewage — decipherable from genetic sequences of viral particles, which some people continue to shed long after their initial infection. Scientists can read those sequences with such precision that they can tie different genetic signatures to individual cases.
In one study, virologist Marc Johnson of the University of Missouri Medical School was able to see that for a full year, copious quantities of virus were excreted by a single person who worked at a small company in Wisconsin. “I had never seen viral levels that high,” he says. “It was insane.”