Wastewater screening a powerful tool, despite imprecision, researchers say
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MONTREAL — Quebec’s Health Department began releasing data on the presence of COVID-19 in wastewater on Wednesday, a potentially powerful screening tool for detecting trends in the evolution of the pandemic, researchers say, but the data it provides can be imprecise.
“It’s a tool that’s helpful when we don’t have ability to test large populations of people to get the true case numbers and it helps us know if we’re heading in the relatively right direction or not. But at the end of the day, I think there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done with it to make it ready for prime time,” said Dr. David Bulir, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton and the head of a group of researchers conducting wastewater screening in that region.
If the concentration of COVID-19 per millilitre of wastewater is rising for an extended period of time, it’s likely a sign that the virus is spreading more in the community being tested, Bulir said in an interview earlier this month. But, other factors can also lead to rising concentration.
“It could be that for some reason, all of a sudden, people have a lot of extra Kleenex that they purchased and they’re blowing their nose more, and they’re throwing that into the toilet, rather than to the garbage, and that’s where you’re actually getting the signal from,” he said.
