For more than a year researchers with the University of San Diego’s School of Medicine have been screening campus wastewater to determine if particles of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were present.
People infected with the virus, which causes COVID-19, are known to shed it in their stool even before they begin showing or experiencing symptoms, Heather Buschman, PhD, said in a press release by UCSD.
Data from more than a year of collection backs up the thoughts of researchers, who began the collections to find signs of the virus and prevent outbreaks on campus, Bushman said.
“Screening for SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, the team showed they can detect even a single infected, asymptomatic person living or working in a large building,” Buschman said. “Notifications to occupants of each building with positive wastewater increased COVID-19 testing rates by as much as 13-fold. Once an occupant tested positive, isolation and contract tracing helped prevent further spread of the virus.”
The research helped detect 85 percent of cases on the UCSD campus early, according to an August 2021 report in mSystems.
Collections were done every morning, seven days a week, by a team of staff and students working with 126 collection robots monitoring 350 buildings on the UCSD campus.
After the collections, the team processed the sewage using a second kind of robot that extracts mRNA, the genetic material that makes up the genomes of viruses, from the samples.
If the virus was detected, Buschman said automated messages went out through a campus-wide system to anyone associated with the affected building.
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“University campuses especially benefit from wastewater surveillance as a means to avert COVID-19 outbreaks, as they’re full of largely asymptomatic populations..." said first author Smruthi Karthikeyan, PhD, an environmental engineer and postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Karthikeyan led the study with senior author Rob Knight, PhD, professor and director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego.
The wastewater screening was part of the university’s “Return to Learn” program, according to Buschman. The program was implemented to bring students and staff back safely during the ongoing pandemic.
“With approximately 10,000 students on campus during the 2020-2021 academic year, the [program] kept COVID-19 case rates much lower than the surrounding community and compared to most college campuses,” Buschman said. “The [program] has become a model for other universities, K-12 school districts and regions.”