The relationship between Covid-19 and No. 2 has also sparked interest in the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security. In an April 21 document listing DHS’ unanswered questions about the pandemic, the department raised questions about the novel coronavirus and feces.
“[T]he relative contribution of different infection sources — fomites, droplets, aerosols, and potentially feces — is unknown,” the document reads.
John Verrico, a spokesperson for the department’s Science and Technology Directorate, said it plans to study „the survivability of the virus in waste (fecal matter), which may inform decontamination processes determined by health officials.“
Grevatt noted that a number of major wastewater utilities around the country have begun monitoring for the virus in their inflow. Officials in Newcastle County in Delaware are watching their wastewater for coronavirus RNA, according to CNN, as are professors in Syracuse, N.Y.
Another example is Clean Water Services, a wastewater utility serving the suburbs west of Portland, Ore. Mark Jockers, head of government and public affairs for the utility, said the utility is working with the startup Biobot to collect and analyze samples with its primary interest being “to track the relative increase or decrease of evidence of COVID-19 in the samples over time.” His utility is also working with researchers at Oregon State University to do finer-scale sampling in hopes of tracking the virus at specific sources like schools, hospitals and retirement homes.
Newsha Ghaeli, co-founder and president of Biobot, said in an interview that starting in late March, her company started collecting samples of wastewater from 170 treatment plants in 37 states, including Massachusetts, New York and Washington, and have been generating and sharing with local municipalities weekly case estimates of how much evidence of the virus is in the samples. Ghaeli said her company aims to help officials get early warnings if the virus appears to be reemerging so that they can try to contain new outbreaks.
„What makes wastewater epidemiology such a great addition to the surveillance framework that communities are putting together right now [is] because it’s such a quick and relatively inexpensive way to get trend data or get a pulse on the scope of the outbreak in communities and understand how it’s trending over time,“ she said.
Meanwhile, members of the White House coronavirus task force have had at least one conversation about the potential for aerosolized feces to spread the virus in buildings. Two sources with knowledge of the conversation told POLITICO that when members gathered for a meeting earlier this year, they discussed concerns about problematic plumbing systems sending high levels of fecal matter into the air. Those airborne feces could then be sucked into vents and spread throughout buildings.
According to the sources, the White House task force members who discussed the matter discounted the possibility that the illness has spread this way in New York, the city with the highest infection rate by far in the U.S.
They also discussed whether this potential method of contamination could affect the spread of the virus in Asia. One of the sources said it was not seen as a major concern in the U.S., however.
The concern isn’t hypothetical; in 2003, officials said SARS — also a type of coronavirus — appeared to have spread in one large Hong Kong apartment building through malfunctioning bathroom pipes, according to a Washington Post report.
“When the bathroom was in use, with the door closed and the exhaust fan switched on, there could be negative pressure to extract contaminated droplets into the bathroom,” a top Hong Kong health official told the Post back then. “Contaminated droplets could then have been deposited on various surfaces such as floor mats, towels, toiletries and other bathroom equipment.”
Source: politico.com
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