The wastewater facility in San Jose processes sewage from more than one million people. The facility is part of a network.
The person is Raquel Maria DIllon.
In Houston, Texas, Boulder, Colorado, and two cities in Northern California, scientists have found traces of omicron in wastewater.
It's a signal that indicates the COVID-19 variant is present in those cities, and highlights the useful data produced by wastewater research as omicron looms.
Wastewater facilities, engineers, epidemiologists and labs need to work together to gather this data. The data from samples of feces can be used to fill in gaps in other forms of public health monitoring and to see the big picture of the Pandemic.
The San Jose-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility processes sewage from over one million people and 22,000 businesses.
This large plant at the south end of the San Francisco Bay is likely to be found in many parts of Silicon Valley.
The deputy director cursed the seagulls that feed on the fat floating on top of raw sewage as he gave a tour and said "every time you flush, think of us."
The staff here retrieve samples daily. They send additional test tubes by courier to an outside lab that is part of the sewer coronaviruses alert network.
Wastewater from plants around Northern California is tested. It's one of many that are looking for covid and omicron in wastewater.
If there are infections in the strands, researchers can identify them by their concentrations, which can be as small as one or two out of a hundred thousand people.
There are thousands of diseases in the sewer. "We work with them safely." It has not been new for us. It's a coronaviruses.
A staffer at San José's wastewater treatment plant shows how to take a sample of sludge for testing. One of the sinks at this sink has a primary sewage line so employees here can test regularly in their lab and send test tubes to another lab for coronaviruses testing.
The person is Raquel Maria DIllon.
Taking a sample involves dodging puddles in a tunnel that runs underneath the smelly tanks. There is a sink in a hallway that discharges black sludge.
The primary sewage is what settles to the bottom of the tanks. It's easier to find a virus there.
The virus sticks to the surfaces of the fattest parts of the body. If there is a trace of the virus's RNA, that's where we thought the maximum potential for capturing it would be.
The San José plant is located in Santa Clara County, where the health officer said that this is step one of an important new early warning system to understand the spread of the omicron variant.
It makes sense to have many different tools for surveilling. She said that they've seen which ones bore fruit. Wastewater surveillance has ended up being helpful.
Wastewater treatment plant employee Satya Nand shows the pipes that carry sewage through a tunnel. Sewage is tested for the presence of omicron RNA. The mini fridge at the San José-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility has plastic containers holding primary sewage in it. The samples are tested daily.
The person is Raquel Maria DIllon.
Researchers flagged four wastewater plants for genetic changes that looked like omicron.
Alexandria Boehm said her team's first findings had some uncertainty while they hurried to find omicron RNA, rather than delta. There was a chance that their tests were picking up on another rare variant.
The alpha variant of Omicron has a similar abnormality to the one that had been circulating several months ago. They swapped out for older tests that had omicron characteristics.
Boehm was more sure after another round of tests. The discovery was announced by SCAN.
She said that she was very sure that omicron was present in the wastewater samples because they detected two different mutations in omicron.
The variant isn't showing up in clinical data in the two counties. Public health officials have not found any cases of omicron in those counties. In California, labs can take weeks to sequence 20% of positive nose swabs.
The public health officials in the two counties were made aware of the presence of omicron after the initial tests from the sewage.
Boehm and her colleagues are confident in their testing, but they are not yet saying that the four positive wastewater samples show community transmission of omicron.
We're going to keep looking at it. Krista Wigginton, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Michigan and a lead researcher on the project, said that if it continues to be present and starts to go up, it's a good indicator that it's circulating.
The team has seen steady concentrations of the Covid RNA in Sacramento over the last two weeks.
Looking for the soup of sewage sludge.
Researchers found that the variant represents a leap in testing and wastewater technology.
Tyler Graber, a cell biologist with the team that monitors wastewater for covid in Canada, compares wastewater testing to looking at a "soup of genes" from all the organisms in the sludge.
He said that they know the language.
The challenge is that the letters are combined with everything else that passes through your body, plus last night's pan drippings that got scratched down the kitchen sink, and so on, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and
Graber said that they understand the language of the disease at a rate that's unprecedented.
Specific and sensitive testing is what the testing is about. It's quick, he said.
It is almost in real time. The alpha variant test took under eight hours to complete. This gave us time to tell the community about the new variant. It's increasing at this rate and you should be reducing your contacts.
In Santa Clara County, the chief health officer has not yet detected omicron cases in wastewater, but she said the beauty of wastewater surveillance is that everyone in a given area gets tested.
Everyone poops, like the children's book says. Everyone contributes samples.
Wastewater surveillance is a way to make up for deficiencies in other forms of testing, it captures data on people who are not sick but who do have symptoms, and people who take at- home rapid tests.
If people don't get a test, the results won't be reported to us and we won't see them in our case data. She said that they will still see it in the data.
Santa Clara County has more than a year's worth of wastewater data to compare with results from the tests. Clinical data trends track wastewater concentrations.
We started to see an increase in the number of sewer sheds a few weeks ago, and now we are seeing an increase in the number of cases. She said that she thinks it gives us information a bit earlier.
