As the U.S. enters year three of the coronavirus pandemic, disease trackers are trying to stay one step ahead of the constantly evolving virus — by hunting for it in feces.
A device called an autosampler collects samples over a 24-hour period as wastewater flows to the treatment plant, or a plant operator collects a bit of “sludge” that has settled from wastewater during the first treatment step.
The average price for a single PCR-based coronavirus test at a U.S. hospital is about $140 vs. about $300 for a lab to analyze a wastewater sample representing a whole community.people who have no symptoms and may not even know they are infected, and does not depend on people seeking medical care or testing. Sampling can be done anywhere there’s a public sewage system.
Rhode Island officials are watching to see if hospital beds fill up; hospitalizations are about half of what they were a month ago, said state health department spokesman Joseph Wendelken.In Houston, virus levels have increased “in a pretty straight line,” but hospitalizations are still falling “ever so gently,” said David Persse, the city’s chief medical officer. “This is the first time wastewater is going in one direction and hospitalization is going in another,” Persse said.
Setting up a monitoring system “is not a simple process where you flip a switch and the data is there,” said Heather Bischel, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Davis. Bischel and Davis city officials are tracking virus levelsEven with funding from the CDC, the monitoring programs take time, labor, equipment and coordination with wastewater treatment plants.
“It doesn’t really smell that bad,” said Jen Mou, a molecular biologist at Kent State University who heads a lab that tests samples. The liquid — the color varies from yellow to black — is poured into tiny test tubes and spun in a centrifuge to separate liquid from solids. Genetic material is extracted from the solids for analysis. A separate review takes place to identify variants.
“Every wastewater treatment plant is its own animal,” said Mike Abbott, environmental health director at Maine’s CDC. In smaller towns, “it may only take a handful of cases to change the concentration.”
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