CDC To Ramp-Up Wastewater Surveillance Scheme To Boost COVID Tracking Efforts
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday it’s expanding a wastewater surveillance program to enhance efforts to track COVID-19 infections across the United States.
“Go on, get the sewer jokes out of your system,” the CDC said in a note in October 2020, shortly after it first launched the scheme, called the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), which tracks SARS-CoV-2 virus levels in wastewater across 400 sites nationwide to better track the spread of COVID-19 in America.
The CDC is now ramping up the NWSS program, announcing on Feb. 4 that it is expanding the network of sites where wastewater is tested for the CCP virus by an additional 250 locations.
“Estimates suggest between 40 and 80 percent of people with COVID-19 shed viral RNA in their feces, making wastewater and sewage an important opportunity for monitoring the spread of infection,” Dr. Amy Kirby, team lead for the NWSS, told reporters at Friday’s briefing.
Kirby said that the data from the surveillance scheme is “uniquely powerful” as it can capture the presence of infections from people with and without symptoms and so is an important tool to gauge COVID-19 prevalence. – READ MORE
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