fbpx

What are feasible ways to track the spread of asymptomatic cases in a community?

Testing and Contact Tracing

A: Sampling sewage (!) and/or a small number of randomly selected individuals

Testing wastewater (aka sewage) is a validated monitoring tool for opioid misuse and antibiotic resistance, and new evidence is demonstrating its effectiveness for detecting the coronavirus.

Utah and Ohio are examples of states rolling out individual-level random sampling on a small subset of the population to assess the extent of community spread.

Links:

Stat News article on wastewater testing

Ohio’s testing efforts

Utah’s testing efforts

Original FB post