U.S. public health officials are expanding their monitoring of Covid-19 in sewage, which has become a crucial early warning for surges of new cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week began sharing virus wastewater trends on its public-facing Covid data website. And the agency is in the midst of expanding the number of places from which raw sewage gets monitored for rising or falling waves of disease, adding hundreds of new sites in the coming months.
The U.S. struggle to track Covid in real-time has been one of the biggest frustrations of the pandemic. Early on, testing capabilities were only a fraction of what was needed. At-home tests, now more plentiful, mostly don’t get reported to health authorities. And even when local health departments and health care providers do get data, consolidating it for real-time analysis has been a challenge.
But with wastewater, the sewage – and the data it contains – keeps flowing.
Paying attention to that data can alert health officials to prepare medical surge teams, send out mobile testing units and to arrange for adequate supplies. It’s also a useful tool for health officials to help confirm what they’re seeing from other sources.
“The advantage wastewater surveillance has is that it’s not dependent on human behavior, beyond using the bathroom,” said Amy Kirby, program lead for CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. “As the dynamics of the pandemic change, it remains an accurate measure.”
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State and local health departments have been using, and publishing, the data since relatively early in the pandemic. The CDC has been monitoring it as well with Kirby’s program watching for SARS-CoV-2 signs in wastewater since 2020. Many cities track and publish the data on their own: Boston, Miami and dozens of others all make at least some data available.
To help get more places watching their wastewater, the CDC has convened working groups with state and local health officials who already use wastewater to track Covid levels. And they’re offering guidance and information sharing to help bring new sites online. As of Friday, the agency has begun posting wastewater data from 255 towns, cities, municipalities and other places.
The CDC has also contracted with a company called LuminUltra to collect wastewater data from 500 sites; about 200 are online so far. Kirby said the agency has identified hundreds more sites that it wants to enroll.
See here for another national tracking project. I also came across another dashboard, the Biobot Network of Wastewater Treatment Plants, which includes two Texas counties (Kaufman and Travis), though neither was up to date at the time. The CDC’s tracker is here. As the story notes, this is a macro view that can’t tell you how many people are sick, and it doesn’t cover all of the country, just places that are connected to sewer systems. But it’s a useful look at the data, which can tell you where the virus is going ahead of testing regimes, and we can use all the data we can get.