Read Gale Brewers letter to NYCDEP
Manhattan B.P. Gale A. Brewer calls for NYC's COVID-19 wastewater testing data to be made public.
NEW YORK -- As Open Data Week begins in New York City, Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer, the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, and BetaNYC called on the New York City Department of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Wastewater Treatment to make public the data from wastewater testing for RNA traces of the COVID-19 virus on the NYC Open Data Portal.
MEASURING COVID-19 IN WASTEWATER AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
People who have Covid-19 shed virus in their feces, and this shows up in wastewater. Because wastewater testing for bacteria and viruses is not new, when it became clear that the Covid-19 pandemic was a serious public health threat, researchers in the Netherlands started testing sewage in wastewater treatment plants in several cities winter of 2020. The researchers found that wastewater data predicted cases by a few days.1 Science magazine described how the testing in Paris was used as an early warning system for understanding the spread of the virus. “Sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region, where a lockdown is now suppressing spread of the disease”."The new study is the first to show that the technique can pick up a sharp rise in viral concentrations in sewage before cases explode in the clinic" 2 Hundreds of cities around the world have been testing wastewater for the virus, since the results show everyone in the sewershed who has the virus, asymptomatic and symptomatic. Boston’s Biobot firm has been graphing the city’s SARS-CoV-2 levels since March, and clearly show the spring surge and the far worse Thanksgiving and post Christmas/New Years surges (see graph below). 3 New York State and New York City use trends of cases, hospitalizations and ICU use to judge virus spread, all of which are lagging indicators of infection prevalence. Testing wastewater tests everyone in an area, not just those who decide to be tested and is a more accurate indicator of the prevalence of the virus in the population.