Some interesting and good news out of the University of Arizona. Scientists’ fascination with sewage stops community spread:
Some big news out of the University of Arizona (@uarizona):
UA scientists & staff found a coronavirus outbreak on campus *before it happened* — and seem to have snuffed it out.
How in the world do you do that?
You use wastewater testing.
— (((Charles Fishman))) (@cfishman) August 27, 2020
The short version is that people who are infected with COVID begin to defecate COVID virus traces very quickly after they become infected. This fact plus a very good understanding by the University of Arizona’s staff about their sewage system allowed for the installation of a partial campus disease surveillance and early warning network. Roughly 20 buildings including all occupied dorms’ outflow pipers are monitored. Before students came on campus, all of these dorms had no COVID in their outflow.
Earlier this week, one dorm had a detected spike in COVID virus traces in the sewage. This is a surveillance signal. It was a signal that was good enough to say “PROBLEM IN HOUSE X”.
The University of Arizona had an action plan; they tested every dorm resident dorm with rapid turnaround tests. 2 out of 300+ people returned a presumed positive test. Those two folks will have a PCR diagnostic test for confirmation. While the confirmation results are being processed, the two presumed positive individuals are isolated and put under medical surveillance. Follow-on testing may be used to confirm that close contacts are not infected.
This is aggressive and effective community public health where the University of Arizona was able to identify non-symptomatic individuals who are likely to be in their infectious period early enough that the window where the presumed infected individuals could bump into non-infected and susceptible people is very small.
It is a good case example of how the surveillance, test, and isolate cycles can work. Sewage surveillance is a valuable tool for public health epidemiologists for COVID and for many other infectious diseases that are often minimally symptomatic. It gives a strong enough signal that should trigger a targeted, localized and effective response. Other surveillance strategies can also perform that function. Routine, recurring, low cost and modestly sensitive testing with extremely rapid turnaround is a more distributed strategy which should allow for the smothering of outbreaks at the individual and micro-cluster level of correlated risk (families, roommmates etc) instead of broad clusters (entire dorms, apartment buildings, most of a workplace etc).
Spanky
Neat shit! I love science!
WereBear
Scientists are detectives. Great work.
rikyrah
This is creepy and amazing
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
This is awesome and shows what you can do when you believe in science!
uila
Big govt using the corona hoax as pretext to monitor our precious bodily fluids. This was always the end game, people, open your eyes! True patriots bury their waste…
guachi
Test the stool.
Save the school.
Chyron HR
Yes, but that’s not NORMAL. Only once America starts acting like everything is normal will we* finally beat** COVID-19.
* the Trump administration
** avoid being held responsible for
JPL
@Spanky: That made me laugh, but science is amazing.
Suzanne
As a Wildcat (class of 2002), this makes me very proud of my alma mater. Bear Down!
NY guy
Is Duke going to do this? Been very impressed with Duke’s process so far.
blacque_jacques
They’re sniffing sewage here in the Netherlands, at least as a check on national case numbers. I don’t know if they’re micro-targeting incipient outbreaks as above.
Soprano2
Our city is involved in a sewer surveillance project about COVID. I don’t know the details, but it makes absolute sense to do this, because you’ll find the load from asymptomatic cases this way without violating anyone’s privacy. What I’ve read is what is confirmed in your post, that the load shows up at least one week before people start showing symptoms. We already meter sewer flows, so we have the city divided into areas (they call them watersheds or sewersheds). It’s relatively simple to collect samples from designated manholes and send them to the lab for analysis. This kind of thing has been done for drug use, too.
DCA
Back in June, one of our local universities had this in their fall reopening plan (for September) , so glad to hear that it works (you need the right kind of followup but I’m sure this place will have that).
LarryB
This is the kind of clever sh*t (sorry, couldn’t help myself) I expect at a university. It makes debacles such as the one at U.N.C. Chapel Hill so infuriating.
The Moar You Know
About a decade ago, I’d read about some city in VA that was experimenting with drug testers in the wastewater system, trying to run down who was using what and where. Never heard another word about that. Either it came to naught or there’s one in every system in America, who knows. This is a better use of such tech.
TaMara (HFG)
Our city just announced they are joining this program. Will be interesting to track – since we are Boulder adjacent and CU started classes again, I’ll take anything to track and try to keep the county open vs. we are expecting to get shutdown by Oct because 18-20 yr olds can’t seem to stop partying.
David Anderson
@TaMara (HFG): Don’t blame the students; they are being placed in an environment where there is broad community spread AND massively conflicting messaging:
People are going to act confused when confusing instructions happen.
TaMara (HFG)
@David Anderson: Oh, I’m not! I agree that we are asking them to do the impossible. But you know CU is rated like the number 1 party school, LOL. And this weekend (first week of school) there were several huge house parties with 100+ people attending each. School/police/landlords are on it.
We have had about 95% mask compliance all summer and our numbers are low, I’d like to keep it that way.
Martin
I would just like to observe that the number of students we have whose poop we can sniff is astonishingly low. Anyone who lives off campus is out of reach. And half of our on campus housing is also out of reach. And relative to most urban campuses, we have a LOT of on-campus housing.
This is the kind of thing that should be done under a national strategy.
I’ll also note that this is the thing Brick Oven Bill was most afraid of – the state monitoring his poops. He was a really fucking weird guy, and even though he stalked me on here, I kind of miss him.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
Martin, do we need to stage an intervention? :-)
PSpain
We had 5 barrios showing Covid in the sewers in early July previewing the uptick here this month. By the end of the month it was turning up in the sewers everywhere again. Now we are seeing the cases.
Great tool but it has to be used to find the source. AU could get it down to a building. Harder to do in a city.
Chuck
@Suzanne:
@Suzanne: All of the buildings on the UA Campus are connected via a tunnel system, and that’s where all of the utilities run. This lets them know which sewage lines came from which buildings. Got in to the tunnels one time from my dorm (Kaibab) when I was a student there (class of 1980)
brantl
You just know Trump is going to read that, and he’s going to recommend people go around sniffing sewers, so that they will become immune, right?
David Anderson
Even if you can isolate to a neighborhood, that is where you surge any additional testing and public health workers.