Waste-Water Warning for COVID

"Waste water is a portal to what's happening in society, and in your community. A lot of things we do on a day-to-day basis touches water. We touch water. We excrete water. Fecal matter has water and goes into the waste water."
"When we run our showers, the medications we take, the personal care products we use ... all of that ends up in the water. And we have the sewer system that is an intricate network that ends up in one spot. And, if you go to that one spot, the waste water treatment plant here in Ottawa, and take a water sample, then  you have a little portal as to what's happening in the community."
"So that shows the promise. That's why people are saying, 'Yeah, maybe we should be doing this'."
"There's good and bad to that [co-location of another jurisdiction's waste water plant]. The good is that it's all been collected and it's all rushing through there. The negative part is that it's ALL rushing through there; there are tons of constituents in that water. So that makes it difficult."
"Two weeks ago we got to the point where we could say, 'We can do this'. We now feel we're getting real data that we're confident in."
"The idea is to catch the next wave and maybe multiple waves [of virus presence]. That's really a goal of ours, where we can catch it and say, 'Hey, something might be up in the community; we're starting to see something again'."
Dr.Robert Delatolla, engineering professor, University of Ottawa

Prof. Robert Delatolla is part of a research team at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Engineering exploring how wastewater testing could be used to detect a second wave of coronavirus.

A team of researchers has embarked on a process to detect tiny pieces of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the waste water collection depots of Canada's National Capital. It has a purpose; to perfect methodology whereby in the near future scientists will be enabled swiftly to detect trends reflecting the health condition of the population at large before a situation explodes into a broad health emergency. Among the researchers is Dr.Delatolla.

For years Statistics Canada has used data gleaned from waste water from five Canadian cities; Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, to determine drug use prevalence among people living in those cities. Health officials in Amersfoort, the Netherland, a city of some 150,000 people located near Utrecht on March 5 discovered the presence of virus remnants in a waste-water check, well before the first clinical case of COVID-19.

That all the human excrement and run-off reflecting the city's human waste activity flushes into the Robert O.Pickard Environment Centre, adjacent Shefford Road in Gloucester, to collect Ottawa's waste water and treat it, represents a direct aid to the research in question. As does the fact that waste water collected in Gatineau's treatment facility located directly across the Ottawa River from Ottawa's own, both feeding into similar systems, and both providing waste-water data reflecting any possible viral-transmission trends.

Robert O.Pickard Environmental Centre. Ottawa. Jean Levac/Postmedia

There are some 3,000 chemicals resulting from personal care products and pharmaceuticals alone contained in the waste water, points out Dr.Delatolla. Daniel Figeys and Marc-Andre MacKenzie, professors with the biochemistry, microbiology and immunology department of the University of Ottawa, along with scientist Alex MacKenzie of the Research Institute of Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, who along with Dr.Delatolla comprise the research team, are searching out fragments of the virus's RNA and proteins.

The team has the capacity to detect single fragments; copies of RNA in a microlitre of waste water; (a microlitre represents one-millionth of a litre -- a single drop of liquid from a commercial eyedropper contains about 50 microlitres, to put things into perspective). While still in the early stages of their data-gathering, the team drew their first samples in early April; weekly tests alternate between the two waste-water facilities as the scientists refine their process.

Only a certain percentage of the population is tested, and some carriers of the virus are asymptomatic, as Dr.Delatolla points out: "But with this, you can go into the waste water, because, literally, everyone has to go to the bathroom, and we know that the virus is shed from our bodies fecally. I imagine the data will tell us a story in this regard [whether the recent easing of provincial and municipal lockdown restrictions will be reflected in greater amounts of novel coronavirus copies found] by the end of the month."