Monitoring sewage samples for covid-19 remnants enabled researchers to identify new variants and track their transmission in communities, with wastewater potentially being a 'central surveillance tool for the global fight against infectious diseases'
A person takes samples from Marseille sewage water near a retirement home in France to detect covid-19 traces in December 2020Sewage analysis may effectively identify the arrival of a new covid-19 variant in a community, as well as the extent and duration of the coronavirus’s spread.
But no study had looked at how reliable the method was at identifying a new variant or determining the speed and distance the virus spreads.at the Medical University of Vienna and his colleagues sampled waste water covering 59 per cent of the Austrian population, about 9 million people, from December 2020 to February 2022. The results of the ongoing study have been informing Austrian policy-makers since mid-2021.
Like the PCR data, the sewage samples showed that the more-transmissible omicron variant became dominant throughout Austria within a few weeks, while the delta variant’s rise to dominance was more gradual, says Bergthaler.Waste-water surveillance may have several advantages compared with contact tracing, which involves testing people for covid-19 after they were in close proximity to someone who was probably infectious.
Bergthaler says the method could be particularly useful in lower-income countries that may lack the means to conduct extensive contact tracing.
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