University joins Covid-19 early warning project

Bath scientists will track Covid-19 by monitoring wastewater across the UK and Africa.

Chemists, biologists and mathematicians from the University of Bath have received funding to monitor wastewater to provide an early warning of the potential spread of Covid-19.

The majority of people Covid-19 are believed to shed the virus in their faeces, even if they are asymptomatic, so sewage surveillance is seen as a way of rapidly identifying emerging disease hotspots before an outbreak spreads.

A new project will consider the challenges of monitoring wastewater in African cities including Lagos and Cape Town where sewage systems are typically informal and decentralised. The project, titled ‘Building an Early Warning System for community-wide infectious disease spread: SARS-COV2 tracking in Africa via environment fingerprinting,’ has so far received £436,000 from the Government via UK Research and Innovation.

Bath’s Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies, Water Innovation Research Group, the Milner Centre for Evolution and the Institute for Mathematical Innovation will collaborate with Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

Professor Barbara Kasprzykhordern, overall project co-ordinator, said: “The coronavirus has had an unprecedented global impact on humanity.

“Within weeks it disabled the functioning of whole countries and exposed global vulnerability to this natural disaster.

“It also exposed the acute inability to rapidly identify, contain and manage a virus due to the lack of an early warning system (EWS) focused on rapid identification of SARS-COV2 hotspots and response. With this project, we’re planning to introduce an EWS.”