The practice of gathering wastewater from different communities and analyzing it for COVID-19 is a public health tool that researchers have said is useful to predict disease trends and support decisions around public health policies.
Wastewater surveillance gained prominence in recent years by providing health officials with a summary of the degree of COVID-19 among Canadians during peaks in the pandemic. But its value beyond the coronavirus was quickly realized as a crucial public health tool.
Wastewater reporting began in 2020, not long after the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization, with more sites added as it continued. "Monitoring has changed over time. It's not all the time comparable, but the trend is certainly reassuring."It became apparent during the pandemic that COVID-19 levels will fluctuate based on the time of year. Disease spread tends to be lower in the warm summer months, with one reason being that people spend more time outdoors.
People receive a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a mass vaccination clinic at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on June 27, 2021. The pandemic was recently downgraded from global emergency status., continued wastewater surveillance is still very important, said Eric Arts, Canada Research Chair in viral pathogenesis and control at Western University in London, Ont.
"There's rapid advancement in technologies, and we can now monitor things that are novel and that are coming into the population, as long as we maintain these surveillance programs," he said. But there is some concern among those in the wastewater surveillance field that despite how essential this new technology is, monitoring could be cut if governments tighten their budgets.The federal government's national wastewater monitoring system currently works with local researchers and labs to collect information from key sites. Additionally, some provinces and territories are funding their own efforts to monitor wastewater at a more local level.
"The technology has proven its value," he said. "There's a lot of potential here, and now that the network and infrastructure has been put in place, we are looking to continue to support it."Poliquin said the scale of it is also cost-effective, with an individual PCR test costing $50 to $100 a person and a wastewater sample test costing $100 to $200.
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