What Are The City’s Sewers Telling Us About COVID-19? - Gothamist

After spending months figuring out the best way to collect and analyze New Yorkers’ fecal matter for traces of the coronavirus, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection is finally getting a steady stream of data from its new wastewater testing program.

At this point, data collected by tracking the virus through the city’s sewers largely serves to confirm the upward trend in COVID-19 transmission demonstrated by the massive volume of individual coronavirus tests that have been administered in recent weeks.

In the scientific community, wastewater testing has been lauded as a method of tracking the virus that is both cost-effective and potentially more equitable and consistent than individual testing efforts, which took a long time to ramp up and are still inadequate in many places.

Because the coronavirus can show up in a person’s feces before they show symptoms, wastewater testing also has the potential to catch cases individual tests would miss.

So far, DEP is collecting samples twice a week from 14 wastewater treatment sites around the city, making the data from wastewater testing less granular than the neighborhood-level rates the city Health Department is able to provide based on individual testing.

Jay Varma, senior health advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio, told local news outlet The City that there is a possibility New York will use wastewater testing to monitor the coronavirus in “a very defined geographic area” or specific facility in the future.

But for now, individual testing remains the dominant mode of tracking the virus.

“In the city we’re doing so many [individual] tests in all neighborhoods, so we’re seeing our results almost in the same timeline that the city Health Department is,” said Sapienza.