Not everyone gets tested for COVID-19, but everyone poops
Analytical chemist Katelyn Foppe holds a tube with a wastewater sample in the lab of Biobot Analytics. Photo: M. Scott Brauer/Redux . That’s the premise behind wastewater epidemiology, one of the areas of research that has been pivotal in understanding the pandemic.
So with the seven-day average of COVID cases rocketing toward 1 million, it’s striking that Biobot Analytic’s data suggests a national undercount. “From summer 2020 to fall 2021, we saw a consistent correlation between wastewater concentration and clinical counts of cases,” says Matus. But that correlation broke in December, when the more transmissible Omicron variant began to dominate in the U.S.
With COVID ICU admissions threatening the all-time record and the daily average of deaths pushing 2,000, such an extreme surge may soon rid Omicron of its reputation as the less dangerous variant at the population level. But there appears to be some good news from the sewer. While Matus says COVID in the wastewater is at a “record high,” the levels are sharply declining in Boston, where the company launched and the cases have only just peaked.
Together with co-founder and architect Newsha Ghaeli, Matus started the company in 2017 to prove their concept of commercializing data from sewage, setting up camp at a manhole in Cambridge that caught waste from bustling Central Square. Their initial focus was to track the other dominant public-health crisis of the past decade: opioids.
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