Last yearthe Michigan department of Health and Human Services and department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy partnered with over a dozen Universities, organizations, and municipalities launched a program that tested for traces of the virus in wastewater. According to officials, the program was succesful.
Susan Peters is a waterborne disease epidemiologist with MDHHS. She said the pilot program helped to test a relatively new surveillance technique at a large scale. The testing aimed to identify traces of Covid within wastewater systems and confirm the virus' presence in the given area.
She said, “It’s definitely an emerging field for us, we’re learning the best we can and gaining experience from all of those partners, but also learning about how Covid is shed into those systems and how we detect that.”
Peters explained that they worked with their partners they developed standard procedures for testing. Collaboration, she said, was critical to the project. Having all the different organizations and their own labs made it a lot easier to get the wide range of samplings from across the state and to create a "surveillance network".
The State Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy was the other state agency involved with the program. EGLE was involved in the testing phase but has since been in charge of organizing the data. The program ran from April 5, 2020 to Dec. 30, 2020, and analyzed a total of 3,204 samples. EGLE is now offering up a dashboard to view the results
Scott Dean is with EGLE, he says the samples came from a variety of different sewage systems and that the test results from the could be used in different ways. In larger systems it could be used more as a general indicator, but in smaller systems the results can be used more precisely. The precise responses came mostly from colleges, who were able to pinpoint samples to specific buildings on campus.
He said, “Ferris State was able to observe a spike in wastewater at a dorm, and this increased detections in wastewater allowed them to once again react and plan their response appropriately.”
Following the success of the program MDHHS is in the process of re-establishing the network in hopes of using it in the future for the current or future outbreaks.
To view the results of the pilot program you can go to EGLE's dashboard here.