Category: Media Publication

December 2023 will mark the third anniversary of the discovery of SARS-COV2, the virus at the source of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is no less important today to monitor the rapidly changing virus than it was three years ago.

In March 2020, the Austrian ski town of Ischgl—known for 239 kilometers of uninterrupted runs and an exuberant après-ski scene—suddenly became infamous as the site of the one of the first COVID-19 superspreading events.

Precision Health is a platform that is open to initiatives and organizations who want to study environments like wastewater for Covid-19, antimicrobial resistance, and other viruses.

Wastewater surveillance is increasingly used to track COVID-19 infections and the spread of new variants. Linda Geddes speaks to Dr Angela Chaudhuri about the Bangalore-based initiative she helped establish,

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the cities’ administration’s response have been city-wide and universal such as (i) with city-wide lockdowns as containment measures, (ii) testing and tracing symptomatic cases and (iii) universal roll out of vaccination programs.

Sewage-based surveillance for COVID-19 has been described in multiple countries and multiple settings. However, nearly all are based on testing sewage treatment plant inflows and outflows using structured sewage networks and treatment systems.

Dr Angela Chaudhuri, Health Lead, COVIDActionCollab in an interaction with Viveka Roychowdhury talks about wastewater surveillance program for COVID-19 initiated by the COVIDActionCollab in Karnataka

An independent project monitoring wastewater in 46 locations in Bengaluru has interesting data that could potentially work as a city-wide early warning system for COVID-19 outbreaks.

A sewage surveillance system providing municipal authorities with data about the presence of the novel coronavirus has found 31 per cent of samples collected from open drain canals since November 28 are registering as positive.

Recently, more than 40,000 people living in around a dozen suburbs in Sydney were asked to get tested for Covid-19 after traces of the novel coronavirus were found in sewage water in the areas despite no new local cases.