Toronto launches pilot project to collect COVID-19 wastewater data | The Canadian News

Toronto hopes wastewater will be used as an additional tool to track the spread of COVID-19 in the community.

Earlier this week, the city’s top doctor said staff would work with academic partners to launch a pilot project to understand more about this method of supervision.

“What we have figured out so far is that it does correlate with clinical data,” said Dr. Eileen de Villa said Monday at the city’s council of health meeting.

She added the city’s plan is to make data collected from these sites accessible as early as next week.

De Villa also said there may be evidence of a plateau of the Omicron variant of recent wastewater monitoring at the city’s four treatment plants.

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It was also seen by Andrea Kirkwood, an environmental biologist at Ontario Tech University, who studied wastewater disease throughout the entire pandemic in Durham and Simcoe.

“We can detect Omicron in all our wastewater treatment sites and it rose sharply between Christmas and New Year and then dropped,” Kirkwood said.

With the province’s testing capacity now limited to high-risk individuals, experts say your waste could be an important tool in determining the extent of the virus in the wider population.

“That toolbox on which public health relied has become depleted,” said Robert Michael Mckay, executive director at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research.

“In terms of a leading indicator of disease within the community, wastewater is probably the best indicator we currently have.”

Municipalities such as Ottawa lead in COVID-19 wastewater management, report the data on a regular basis.

Dr. Doug Manuel, a senior scientist at The Ottawa Hospital, says sewage can also identify asymptomatic carriers, giving a more complete picture of virus spread.

“People drop SARS-CoV-2 when they are asymptomatic, or very early. “So you can pick people up in wastewater earlier than when you wait for them to become symptomatic,” he said.

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