United States: It is so simple to keep track of COVID-19 through wastewater as a way to monitor outbreaks of the disease in a city this is according to a new study.
The COVID virus, SARS-CoV-2, levels in wastewater sampling could foretell by one week the day-to-day increase and decrease of the number of cases within a community, according to researchers June 23 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
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According to the senior researcher Dr. Timothy Schacker, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota Medical School, “We learned during 2020 that rising SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater provided a two-week heads up of coming COVID visits to hospitals and clinics,” US News reported.
“This ongoing work demonstrates the continued importance of wastewater surveillance to public health planning for our state’s hospitals and clinics,” he noted.
Keeping tabs on COVID-19 outbreaks is as easy as tracking a city’s #wastewater, a new study from the UMN Medical School says.
— UMN Medical School (@umnmedschool) June 26, 2025
Read more: https://t.co/7nGcDy5R9s.#COVID19
In the study, scientists collected 215 wastewater samples at the Twin Cities Wastewater Treatment Plant from January 2022 to August 2024. Researchers said in background notes that the plant serves approximately 1.8 million inhabitants of the region that includes Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.
The researchers of the team compared the virus presence identified in such samples with the reported COVID infections of the individuals that received treatment by Fairview Health Services, which is a Minnesota-based health system.
Researchers said that Fairview had nearly 6,900 cases of COVID by the end of the 32-month study among residents of the area served by the treatment plant.
There were three major surges of COVID cases during that period, and researchers said it was easy to detect the rise of each case by analyzing the level of the virus in wastewater, as US News reported.
“If this pattern continues, it suggests that SARS-CoV-2 may not have the same seasonal patterns as other respiratory viruses such as influenza or RSV, which increase during the fall and winter months,” researchers added.