SANTA CLARA COUNTY, Calif. (KRON) - As health leaders try to better understand the spread of the coronavirus, researchers in the South Bay are turning to a unique source for some answers.
It might sound strange but this is not a new concept.
It's called wastewater-based epidemiology and during the age of COVID has become more widely used around the world to track community spread.
“What is new, is trying to interpret that data and applying public health responses to that information,” Michael Balliet said.
Michael Balliet is the director of Santa Clara's Department of Environmental Health, he says your stool is actually quite the tool for COVID-19 detections and spread.
“What we are focusing on is based on the research done by Stanford is what we call the settled solids and because we know COVID is actually in stool, our focus is on the solids from the treatment plant as opposed to the liquid influent,” Balliet said.
Santa Clara County is the only jurisdiction in the state monitoring all four of its wastewater treatment plants for COVID-19.
Those plants are in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Gilroy.
Researchers are sent the untreated waste to test for any presence of coronavirus RNA.
Universities across the country have been monitoring wastewater in dormitories to try and detect COVID-19 before outbreaks can begin on campuses but this method is a little different.
“What we're doing is looking at it on a community-wide level as opposed to an individual facility or neighborhood level,” Balliet said.
Stanford says the RNA data they've collected from waste over the last nine months have matched that of clinical COVID-19 data in the county.
Balliet says it will take some time before this research can be the main tool for health officials, but eventually, it should be able to help predict a rise in cases ahead of time.
"That could be the time that could help us prepare for an upcoming surge or make sure we're deploying resources to a community or in a particular manner that could be more efficient and effective -- one of the challenges we have right now is community spread is so high, and concentrations are so high, that we really have to see what happens when the community prevalence starts to decrease," Balliet said.
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