What You Flush Is Helping Track The Coronavirus

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

More than 100 cities are monitoring sewage for the presence of the coronavirus, and public health officials think wastewater could provide an early warning system to help detect future spikes. NPR science correspondent Lauren Sommer explains how it works, and why scientists who specialize in wastewater-based epidemiology think it could be used to monitor community health in other ways.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.0	Emily Quang here with NPR Science Correspondent Lauren Summer.
0:08.8	Hey Lauren, hey Emily.
0:10.4	So for today's show, there's really only one place to start.
0:14.9	Yeah, it's a freezer full of poop.
0:19.9	So this is the negative 80 where we keep the samples.
0:24.0	That's Stephanie Loeb, a postdoc at Stanford University.
0:27.1	She gave me a tour on Skype of that freezer in her lab.
0:30.8	It's, yeah, very, very cold.
0:33.2	There's rows of boxes inside each filled with small vials
0:37.4	of, as she calls them, human solids.
0:40.9	Yep, it's all sorts of shades of that same color,
0:44.9	sometimes darker and sometimes lighter.
0:47.5	OK, thanks for painting that picture.
0:50.7	So why does this freezer of waste exist Lauren?
0:54.2	Well, one of the problems with tracking the coronavirus
0:56.7	pandemic has been sampling, right?
0:59.2	We need to be checking a lot of people for the virus
1:02.2	and often testing has been slow to ramp up in the US.
1:06.2	But if you think about it, all of us provide biological samples
1:10.5	every day.
1:12.1	I see where you're going with this.
	...

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