New York City Will Test Its Sewage For Coronavirus

NEW YORK, NY — The newest coronavirus testing site in New York City isn't the neighborhood clinic, it's at your local sewage plant.

The city's Department of Environmental Protection has started collecting samples from all 14 of its wastewater facilities as a new way to track the coronavirus in New York City, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, whose Solid Waste Advisory Board suggested the practice, announced this week.

The samples will be tested for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, through a method that experts say could track the spread of the virus in hundreds of thousands of people at a time.

“Sewer surveillance has great promise to supplement contact tracing and other individualized approaches by providing rapid and frequent snapshots of the virus’s prevalence at the community and municipality scale,” said Hofstra University Professor Dr. Kevin Bisceglia.

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The DEP will send samples to Stanford University for analysis and also has a team at its Newtown Creek Microbiological Laboratory hoping to set up in-house analysis in the future, according to the borough president.

Brewer first wrote to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo about using the tracking method in early May after the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board analyzed a similar practice in the Netherlands.

The analysis concluded that the method could signal which communities are having a surge in COVID-19 infections even before local hospitals get overwhelmed with cases.

It is already being used in some counties in upstate New York, and is ready to be scaled statewide, according to scientists who developed their own testing system at Syracuse University, SUNY ESF, and SUNY Upstate.

"...This platform provides real-time information on transmission dynamics, instant feedback on social distancing and re-opening society, and over time will be able to forecast hospitalizations with greater accuracy than currently available," Syracuse Professor David Larsen, an expert in infectious disease epidemiology, said earlier this month.

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