Key Points
By regularly testing virus levels in public wastewater, health institutions are able to target treatments and interventions to the worst-affected areas before doctors on the ground realize somethings going on..
If you can get the information to hospitals or clinics weeks earlier, that gives the opportunity to start thinking about what treatments they might need, says Marisa Donnelly, senior principal epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, which helped develop a wastewater surveillance system for the US Centers for Disease Control...
Wastewater analysis gives you better situational awareness of whats going on and how much its fluctuating over time, because we have [historically] very much underdetected RSV cases, says Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H..
The concept of tracking a virus through wastewater came to prominence in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, says Tyson Graber, associate scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, who worked on wastewater analysis as part of Ontarios Covid response..
It can capture asymptomatic cases and other cases independent from medical systems, and provides a broader population-level perspective on disease spread, she says.. The CDCs program is set up so that, if RSV levels are high in a particular community, local health departments can prioritize interventions, including testing, infection control, and vaccination efforts...
