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Wastewater Being Used to Trace Covid-19 in CNY Wastewater Helping Trace COVID-19

By Michelle Knezovic

Dr. Larsen: “Instead of testing a bunch of people for the coronavirus you can just test one waste water sample. Get a feel for what transmission is doing in that community.”

So here’s how the test works
Water flows downhill always, so in a community there is a central point
A point Water is separated, some released back into community, other wastewater
Water contributed by many people in your community. Representative sample
Sampling pulling out water droplets.
It is then filtered to see if there are pieces of the virus Look for finger prints/traces of virus. So that wastewater isn’t wasteful after all.
Larsen has proposed that this would be a bi weekly test to see a normal trend so then they could spot a change.

Larsen: “we want to have that trend in place to make sure that doesn’t come up, because those waste water levels will go up before we see that same type of increase in the amount of cases, through hospitalizations. So in that way it can act as a warning signal”

it doesn’t necessarily mean that, there’s an outbreak but you could see traces of it before an outbreak happens say in Syracuse or a specific community or city.
Larsen: “Yea so right now we can’t say we have this much RNA in the waste water which means we have this many cases in the waste water which means we have this many cases in the community, but we can see it might go up it might go down. SO in Onondaga County we’ve seen it go down, similar to the hospitalizations in NY we’ve seen it go down.”

By the end of July Larsen hopes to have a full database created so that members of the community can look online to see how COVID is moving in their town.

Larsen “Every person should be able to look and say what does the COVID 19 transmission look like in my community, and then every person should be able to say well maybe I won’t do that or maybe I will do that. Maybe I will not go visit grandma this week but maybe next week I will.”

BALLSTON LAKE, NY (NCC NEWS)— A system used to track polio over 25 years ago is now being used to track COVID-19

Dr. David Larsen, a professor at Syracuse University is a part of a team in Central New York tracking the transmission of COVID-19.

So here’s how the test works:

  1. Water flows downhill always, so in a community there is a central point
  2. The water is separated, into a waste pile and recycled pile
  3. The water is contributed by many people in your community
  4. It is then sampled & filtered to see if they’re pieces of the virus. The scientists look for finger prints/traces of virus (not the live virus)

“Instead of testing a bunch of people for the coronavirus you can just test one waste water sample. Get a feel for what transmission is doing in that community,” said Larsen.

They cannot detect how many cases are in a specific place, but by tracking the virus there is a possibility to see a change in transmission before an outbreak.

“We want to have that trend in place to make sure that doesn’t come up, because those waste water levels will go up before we see that same type of increase in the amount of cases, through hospitalizations. So in that way it can act as a warning signal,” said Larsen.

By the end of July Larsen plans to have a full database where people can see the transmission in there community.

“Every person should be able to look and say what does the COVID 19 transmission look like in my community, and then every person should be able to say well maybe I won’t do that or maybe I will do that. Maybe I will not go visit grandma this week but maybe next week I will,” said Larsen.

Larsen hopes that by the fall this testing and database will he statewide. Right now they are working with eight counties throughout Upstate and Central New York.

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