High Levels Of SARS-CoV-2 Discovered In Urban Wastewater Systemv

An unexpectedly high presence of the novel coronavirus has been detected in a Massachusetts sewage treatment facility, providing a potential new way to determine community case numbers without widespread testing. “Despite [the] pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2 worldwide, broad access to testing in the United States has thus far been severely limited,” write the study authors in a paper not yet peer-reviewed on the pre-print server medRxiv. “While it is impractical to test every US resident for SARS-CoV-2, the virus has been found in the stool of confirmed COVID-19 patients, making it a promising candidate for wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE).”