TAKING POO’S CLUES
Somerville starts wastewater testing program to track any virus spikes
As Somerville cautiously moves into a limited Phase 3 in its coronavirus reopening plan and Tufts students return, the city is launching a community wastewater testing program in the hopes of getting ahead of any virus spikes.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is shed in the stool of infected individuals. By analyzing samples of sewage, Somerville officials are hoping to spot coronavirus hot spot zones one to two weeks earlier than conventional clinical testing.
Wastewater testing is starting this week, and officials are expected to initially zero in on the Tufts University neighborhood, areas with high concentrations of vulnerable residents or high density, and public schools once on-site classes begin.
“Adding wastewater testing to our COVID-19 interventions is like adding a smoke alarm to your house,” Mayor Joe Curtatone said in a statement. “It provides a warning before the problem gets out of control. This new tool will
‘Adding wastewater testing to our COVID-19 interventions is like adding a smoke alarm to your house.’
MAYOR JOSEPH CURTATONE
greatly enhance our ability to detect and contain COVID-19 clusters in Somerville as they emerge.
“We all know now that widespread testing and contact tracing is critical to controlling the spread of the virus, and the earlier and the more comprehensive the testing is, the better we can reduce virus spread,” he said. “This program will give us a head start.”
The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, the state’s top wastewater agency, has been partnering with a Cambridge lab to analyze the wastewater of millions of Boston-area residents.
The MWRA in June hired the MIT-affiliated lab Biobot to analyze its sewage on Boston’s Deer Island for the next six months — in the hopes of catching a possible second wave of the virus.
The city of Cambridge will be using MWRA wastewater data to help inform the safety of reopening the city’s schools.
“Data on COVID-19 spread from wastewater analytics is an essential component of our decisionmaking framework for reopening schools,” Kenneth Salim, superintendent of Cambridge Public Schools, said in a statement.
For Somerville’s wastewater monitoring, the city is partnering with Northeastern University Assistant Professor Ameet Pinto of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Stantec, the city’s on-call engineering firm for sewer work and design.
“This detection tool will identify neighborhood trends to support the city’s mission in mitigating the risk of COVID-19 in the community,” David Van Hoven, senior principal with Stantec, said in a statement.
Somerville Director of Health and Human Services Doug Kress said wastewater testing can be “especially helpful for vulnerable populations and targeted locations such as senior care facilities or college campus areas.”
Out west, for instance, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are analyzing the wastewater on campus.
The Somerville project will also sequence the genes of SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which tends to accumulate mutations over time and may provide useful information on the origin of COVID-19 clusters.
This data will be shared with researchers and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wastewater testing program.