Centralpoint proposed to assist with COVID-19 early detection in Waste Water Treatment Plants

Oxcyon has proposed it's Centralpoint Data Aggregation platform to the NIH to automatically ingest and report on data from over 23,000 Pulbic Waste Water Treatment plants nationwide to detect COVID-19. This proposed solution is designed to empower NIH to better monitor COVID-19 (and other) health related data, by municipality, county and state, which would not require any individualized testing. This solution aggregates data submitted from each participating location on a scheduled basis, allowing for online reporting and alerts to be generated both to the NIH, and/or participating State, County and local municipalities. Data collected originates from sludge samples taken at each facility in order to process and report findings in a near real time basis. In this instance, the Audience structure represents the individual waste water treatment plants, by their respective municipaiity, county and state allwoing for all reporting to roll up for nationwide reporting, or be seen at each (cascading) level to report on any anomolies.

“There is real hope that this can be a sensitive, early warning” if, as officials ease social distancing measures, Covid-19 begins to spread again, said Peter Grevatt, CEO of the nonprofit Water Research Foundation. “Several labs have achieved a proof-of-concept in terms of demonstrating the ability to detect the RNA [genetic material] of the virus in wastewater.” Studies in the U.S. and the Netherlands, among others, have shown you can pick up a signal about a week before the first clinical case.Grevatt and his colleagues briefed congressional staffers last week on the potential for wastewater analysis to be the canary in the Covid-19 coal mine, and on Wednesday the National Academies’ Water Science and Technology Board hosted a panel discussion on how to build a surveillance network and what additional research is needed to make it work. Water utilities from southeastern Virginia to Portland, Ore., are already conducting the analysis on their own. And by next week, Grevatt’s group will have identified the labs that will participate in a quality control test deemed crucial for rolling out a nationwide effort to analyze wastewater for coronavirus: The foundation will send wastewater samples gathered by several utilities to all participating labs and have them run the analysis, compare results, and agree on best practices.

Countries are not waiting for every scientific question to be answered. Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands have already launched national wastewater surveillance programs to catch any resurgence of Covid-19. “People are already starting to scale this up,” environmental engineer David Sedlak of the University of California, Berkeley, told the Academies’ panel. 

The stakes are enormous. As states ease social distancing, they need to know if they are reopening too quickly. If they can’t detect a surge of cases until patients show up in emergency rooms, it could be too late to prevent a repeat of this spring, when hospitals in New York City and elsewhere were overwhelmed. If, as many hope, the country makes it through the summer with a “flattened curve” — keeping cases below the number that hospitals can handle — then it will be crucial to be on high alert for any second wave in the fall.

“Wastewater epidemiology” has been used for decades to detect polio in countries where the disease remains endemic and, more recently, to estimate the prevalence of opioid abuse in U.S. communities.
“We know that SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19] is shed in stool, which means it can be collected in sewage systems,” said Megan Murray of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In small studies so far, the detection of the new coronavirus in sewage samples “has correlated very nicely with the arrival of Covid-19 into different communities,” she added, including picking up “significant amounts of viral material” in Boston sewage weeks before cases arrived in March.

Wastewater has been used in other ways as a public health surveillance tool. Biobot, which was spun out of MIT, has also been involved in efforts to detect opioids in wastewater, as a way to help communities track patterns of drug use and developing public health threats. European countries have long been involved in surveilling the spread of antibiotic resistance through wastewater. And sewage has been used to look for other emerging and known viruses, including polio.

The new research comes at an unprecedented moment in public health: The difficulty and expense of obtaining individual tests for millions of people combined with the virus’ rapid transmission means that public health officials are looking for other ways to grasp the scale of the spread. Clinical testing largely is for those with more severe symptoms, meaning those who are asymptomatic or have milder symptoms — but can still be contagious — often are missed. This proposed solution has not yet been accepted or adopted by the NIH, but has been submitted for consideration. Oxcyon will update this new article as new information develops.