Boston to start its own COVID wastewater testing

[edschweppe]

The Boston Public Health Commission is going to start its own program of testing wastewater for the virus that causes COVID-19:

With COVID-19 levels in waste water rising in the region, officials in Boston have partnered with vendors to set up 11 waste water testing sites across the city, the leader of the Boston Public Health Commission said Monday.

"We will be sampling these sites weekly to determine viral concentration in waste water locally," Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the city's public health commissioner, said during a City Council meeting. "And we'll also be able to conduct surveillance regarding new variants."

The city is partnering with BioBot, which tracks COVID-19 levels in waste water in Eastern Massachusetts for the state, and Flow Assessment on the testing initiative.

With broader COVID-19 testing declining "significantly" across Boston, "we need to understand transmission and spread within our communities," Ojikutu said.

The city has been receiving information that is aggregated from Boston and 22 other locales. The Boston testing sites have been set up "because we want to really understand what's happening in our neighborhoods," Ojikutu said.

City officials are using $3.9 million in federal funding to pay for the project.

"The plan is to use [this] data for planning and intervention development," Ojikutu said, adding that officials believe they'll be able to publicly share the data soon.

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The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority reports numbers for both the southern and northern sections of its system. The southern section includes parts of Newton and Brookline as well as Framingham, Ashland, and Stoughton. The northern section stretches north from Boston to Wilmington.

The testing determines the number of SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies per milliliter of waste water.

In the northern MWRA section, the seven-day average count of the virus reached a measure of 759 on Nov. 29. The number had been as high as 8,644 in January and as low as around 100 in March.

In the southern section, the seven-day average count was higher on Tuesday — 937. The numbers for that region had been as high as 11,446 last January before falling below 100 in March. The last time numbers for both sections were this high was in late October.

Good to see that somebody in public health is noticing the current spike in wastewater levels. Especially since, per the state's latest report, Massachusetts as a whole has over ninety-five percent of its hospital beds currently full. The state's emergency rooms were "beyond the brink" last month; things have only gotten worse.