The coronavirus has been found in an unexpected place--sewage, experts claimed. And they are now using human waste to collect data of coronavirus infections. According to Forbes' latest report, sewage is now being tested by hundreds of United States cities to find early signs of coronavirus hotspots.
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Many other places such as New York, Utah, Florida, California, and Oregon are also collecting poop samples from sewage to test for the coronavirus. Researchers claim that sewage allows for the detection of hotspots for the disease before the diagnosis of clinical cases.
Gauging coronavirus infections in sewage
According to Bloomberg Businessweek's previous report, New Castle began focusing on feces as an unusual source to gauge coronavirus infections and collect data points. Like most of the American communities during the federal government's initial pandemic response, the Delaware country of New Castle is still struggling with severe limitations and conflicting information regarding COVID-19 testing.
"I firmly believe that we will have another outbreak of the virus this fall, so we will be firmly ready for that," said Ken Williamson, the head of research at the Oregon-based Clean Water Services.
"We wanted to be able to sample from nursing homes, from hospitals and from potentially schools when the kids go back this fall," he added.
Possible coronavirus hotspots
According to Forbes' report, Williamson estimates that people secrete 10 million to a billion viruses for every gram of feces on a daily basis. This means that before a person develops symptoms, the coronavirus would appear in fecal matter.
Local workers send the sewage samples they have collected to startup Biobot Analytics or university researchers to be analyzed. Meanwhile, a local analysis center is expected to be set up in New York. It is still unclear how much detectable COVID-19 virus is shed by people in their feces.
Tyler Radneiki, an Oregon State University population biologist, said that in an ideal scenario health officials can investigate the identified hotspots using the information gathered by the researchers from sewage testing. According to the report, the sewage testing in Erie county, New York detected 20,000 cases of coronavirus on June 23.
"Sewer surveillance has great promise to supplement contact tracing and other individualized approaches by providing rapid and frequent snapshots of the virus's prevalence at the community and municipality scale," said Dr. Kevin Bisceglia, a Hofstra University professor. $4.2 million was raised in April to estimate the scope of coronavirus by analyzing feces.
