A community’s sewage holds clues about its COVID-19 burden. Over the course of the pandemic, wastewater surveillance has become an increasingly popular way to try to understand local infection trends.
Microbiologists Susan De Long and Carol Wilusz met and became wastewater aficionados in April 2020 when a grassroots group of wastewater treatment plant operators asked them to develop and deploy a test to detect SARS-CoV-2 in samples from the sewers of Colorado. De Long is an environmental engineer who studies useful bacteria. Wilusz’s expertise is in RNA biology. Here they describe how wastewater surveillance works and what it could do in a post-pandemic future.
