The University of Arizona used a secret weapon this week to test its 5,000 students as they prepared to move into their dorms. Aside from nasal swab testing for COVID-19, university officials scoured sewage for signs of the virus. The technique worked. A wastewater sample from one of the dorms came back positive, and two asymptomatic students who lived in that dorm also tested positive for the virus and were quickly quarantined, preventing what could have been a major outbreak.
Wastewater can be an effective tracking tool to trace COVID-19 since experts say the virus shows up in feces before other symptoms such as fevers and coughs appear. There has been widespread support for a national wastewater surveillance program to a help track COVID-19 to provide a cost effective way to detect early signs of where the disease is spreading.
According to The Washington Post, the University of Arizona elected to test sewage from all 20 of its residence halls. Other schools, including the University of California, are doing the same.
“You think about if we had missed it, if we waited until they became symptomatic and they stayed in that dorm for days, a week, or the whole incubation period, how many other people would have been affected,” said Dr. Richard Carmona, a former U.S. surgeon general who was appointed to lead the school’s reentry program, according to the Post.