As mask mandates and cases drop, and people throw around the word “endemic” with increased fervor, wastewater testing may be the future of Covid-19 precautions.
But across the state, no one seems to know how best to utilize wastewater data.
Brighton, Springfield, St. Albans and Winooski have joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, a program that provides federal funding for wastewater testing, according to Amy Polaczyk, wastewater program manager at the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Burlington also tests wastewater for Covid but is not part of the federal program.
The CDC indicated that Vermont could have another 20 towns participate in the federal program, and the Department of Environmental Conservation this week sent out invitations to all municipalities eligible to participate, Polaczyk said.
In January, the federal government first began enrolling Vermont municipalities in its wastewater testing program.
Thus far, Vermont’s Department of Health has not utilized wastewater data from the CDC collection program, according to department spokesman Ben Truman. But the state health department has used Burlington’s wastewater data “to guide our response,” Truman wrote in an email to VTDigger.
The department does expect to use the forthcoming federal data, but there are more questions than answers for the moment.
“We are currently designing a COVID-19 surveillance report that will take into account several metrics including wastewater surveillance,” said Lynn Blevins, the Department of Health’s deputy epidemiology branch director for Covid-19 response. “We have not yet decided how wastewater surveillance data will be shared.”
Wastewater testing for the coronavirus can predict Covid-19 cases roughly six days in advance, according to data from the CDC.
In St. Albans, Brian Willett, the city’s chief wastewater operator, has struggled with the data he’s received from the CDC’s contractor, LuminUltra.
He said that after about three weeks of twice-weekly sampling, he received data back from the lab. But interpreting the graphs and the relevance of each metric isn’t intuitive, and he plans to meet with the contractor to better understand how to practically apply the data.
Jon Rauscher, Winooski’s public works director, has had a different issue with LuminUltra’s data.
“My understanding is the data that they’ve gathered isn’t quite accurate,” Rauscher said. “But it does sound like they fixed that issue, according to the CDC folks. So it sounds like going forward, we should have some data that we can actually utilize.”
Because the city already has to regularly collect wastewater samples for various state permitting requirements, Rauscher said the new testing is “really no additional work.”
The federal government provides sampling bottles, shipping labels and pays for the lab testing, he said.
Rauscher hopes that once the city begins receiving reliable data, the public works department can use the information to inform policy.
“When, for example, our emergency management folks are looking at masking and things like that, it’s just some additional really granular data that we can look at when we’re trying to make those decisions,” he said.
