For the first time, the US CDC has published data that looks at how much coronavirus is turning up in the country's wastewater. Read more:
Three days before Thanksgiving, a planeload of passengers from South Africa touched down in San Francisco. One of them was a woman who was in the early stages of a Covid-19 infection, though she wouldn't know it for almost another week.
Wastewater-based epidemiology has proven to be so reliable in dozens of pilot projects across the US that the government has invested millions to create the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a network of 400 testing sites spread across 19 states that is coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This kind of testing is highly sensitive. It can pick up the presence of the virus when just one person out of 100,000 in a given area, or sewershed, is infected. Government investment has taken what had been a little-known branch of public health and brought it into the mainstream. The Monday before Thanksgiving, Boehm alerted her team to the new variant. On Tuesday, they downloaded the handful of gene sequences for the new variant that had been sent to GISAID, a website used by researchers around the world to share information about the new coronavirus.
"We knew Alpha was basically gone. It's extinct in our region," she said. That meant any hits on the Alpha tests were probably the new variant. The woman had recently traveled from South Africa, landing in San Francisco on Nov. 22. She didn't seek out testing until nearly a week later, on Monday, Nov. 28, four days after the first wastewater sample in Merced was positive.And in Santa Clara County, they got their first hit in Palo Alto on Dec. 7, the same day a person living in same sewershed became that county's first case.
Kirby says it's also a useful tool to let counties and cities know where to direct limited resources.
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