Ottawa researchers leading the way in COVID-19 wastewater tracking

A program to detect COVID-19 in wastewater that was pioneered by Ottawa researchers is being expanded across the province.

The Ontario government committed $12 million in Thursday's budget to a pilot project aimed at detecting COVID-19 in raw wastewater. The project could “provide an early warning of COVID-19 outbreaks. This could help the health care sector take early action to safeguard communities.”

Alex Munter, president and CEO of CHEO, which has funded the program in Ottawa, called the pilot project “a feather in the cap of University of Ottawa and CHEO researchers who have pioneered this in the Canadian context.”

Researchers from universities in Ottawa, Waterloo and Windsor formed a hub early in the pandemic to track community COVID-19 levels by tracking wastewater. Ottawa is already working with Hamilton and Casselman and Waterloo is working with Peel and York to sample their wastewater for COVID-19 levels, said uOttawa engineering professor Robert Delatolla, one of the researchers behind the Ottawa program, along with scientists from the CHEO Research Institute.

Ottawa is the only municipality in the province and one of a few across North America that does real-time daily wastewater readings. The city's wastewater data is posted daily at 613covid.ca/wastewater, something that has gained attention around the province and around the world.

This fall when cases began to spike in Ottawa, wastewater tracking also offered an insight into the rate of infection in the community that was not influenced by the numbers of people being tested. Wastewater tracking showed the amount of COVID-19 in the community was continuing to climb, even as testing data suggested numbers were levelling off.

Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches, who has come to rely on the data, said recently that wastewater tracking showing COVID-19 levels had stabilized in Ottawa was one of the factors that helped convince her things were improving. Numbers from testing data alone can be misleading because they depend on how many people get tested.

Wastewater tracks COVID-19 even in people with no symptoms.

Munter said the data will be especially important as Ottawa begins to reopen businesses this weekend. “As we open up again, I think we will want to keep a close eye on the wastewater because that will allow us very quickly to ascertain if the is a problem. This is a real-time indicator. That is its power.”

A team at the Robert O. Pickard Environmental Centre (ROPEC), which treats wastewater from 91.6 per cent of Ottawa's population, collects samples throughout the day and night. Those sample are combined and then sent to Ottawa Public Health at the end of each day, seven days a week to allow for reporting in real time.

The Ottawa program has, until now, been supported by small research grants and money from CHEO.

The provincial funding will allow Delatolla to order new equipment and hire researchers to help expand their work.