City of San José Environmental Services Department’s environmental inspectors Isaac Tam and Laila Mufty deploy an autosampler into a manhole at the San José - Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility. (Image credit: City of San José Environmental Services Department)
City of San José Environmental Services Department's environmental inspectors Isaac Tam and Laila Mufty deploy an autosampler into a manhole at the San José - Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility. (Image credit: City of San José Environmental Services Department) A new wastewater testing approach capable of better detecting viral infection patterns in communities could prove a crucial step toward an informed public health response to diseases like COVID-19. Accurately identifying changes in community COVID-19 infections through wastewater surveillance is moving closer to reality. A new study, published in Environmental Science & Technology , identifies a method that not only detects the virus in wastewater samples but also tracks whether the infection rates are trending up or down. Testing wastewater - a robust source of COVID-19 as those infected shed the virus in their stool - could be used for more responsive tracking and supplementing information public health officials rely on when evaluating efforts to contain the virus, such as enhanced public health measures and even vaccines when they become available. The test works by identifying and measuring genetic material in the form of RNA from SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. "This work confirms that trends in concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater tracks with trends of new COVID-19 infections in the community.
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