New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Using wastewater tests, UConn tracked COVID to individual dorms
STORRS — The University of Connecticut’s tracking of the COVID-19 virus by monitoring wastewater is not only catching positive cases sooner, it is a model that others are now trying to copy.
“We have been contacted by a few other universities to help them implement this strategy for their campuses,” said Rachel O’Neill, director of the UConn Institute for System Genomics during a Wednesday meeting of UConn Board of Trustees meeting.
Quinnipiac University and Villanova University are among them, UConn officials said. They added that UConn is also advising some Connecticut municipalities who want to use wastewater testing.
In the spring, UConn plans to start testing for the flu in addition to COVID through wastewater samples and will conduct sequencing of COVID-19 samples it to see if more than one strain is present on campus.
“The overwhelming reaction is wow, wow, and wow,” said Jeanine Gouin, a trustee and chair of the board’s academic affairs committee.
Suzanne Onorato, director of health and wellness at UConn, said the state’s flagship university has had a Surveillance Testing
Work Group in place since May. Its wastewater testing began shortly after.
Kendra Maas, a UConn scientist who works on conducting genomic sequencing on bacterial and fungal communities in samples, applied her skills to testing the wastewater around campus.
“Wastewater is really difficult to work with,” Maas said in a recent interview with UConn Today.
But there were studies that suggested COVID-19 genes could be measured in wastewater. As it turns out, it is not only measurable but can provide a seven-day advanced notice before anyone shows symptoms. That is particularly important on college campuses where many students with the virus remain asymptomatic.
UConn collects and treats its own wastewater. That allowed for officials to test manholes in 16 locations on campus for the presence of the virus in feces.
Maas worked out a daily testing protocol and notifies campus health officials when a spike is detected.
If the wastewater is coming from a particular dorm, instead of testing everyone, pooled samples are collected through saliva, cutting down on the number of individual COVID tests that have to be administered.
“Instead of testing 100 we can run 10 pooled tests,” said Onorato. “That is 90 clinical tests you don’t have to perform.”
It also cuts down on the cost. Pooled tests cost the university about $4 per sample compared to an individual test that can run from $50 to $140.
In October, when Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force paid a visit to UConn, she was impressed, noting that the university was not relying on one detection strategy.
In the spring, UConn plans to step up testing, starting with testing everyone who returns to campus in January. In all, it plans to conduct 75,000 tests over the course of the spring. In the fall, more than 43,000 tests were conducted.
About 2,700 of those were pooled samples and an additional 650 wastewater samples.
Since the start of the fall semester, 381 residential students and 75 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19, according to the UConn dashboard.
Instead of testing every one in a potentially impacted dorm, UConn started doing pool testing with saliva to narrow those that need an individual COVID test.
UConn Provost Carl Lejuez said the strategies helped keep the campus open despite the pandemic.
UConn finished the oncampus portion of its fall semester with Thanksgiving.