When can we ease coronavirus quarantines? Our poop may hold the answer, studies say

When will it truly be safe to loosen state social-distancing measures?

Some researchers say the answer may be in a community’s sewage, based on results from ongoing studies in Massachusetts and Delaware.

Researchers are increasingly using wastewater analyses to track the spread of the coronavirus in a given community, The Los Angeles Times reported. Earlier this month, researchers with MIT, Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts tested samples of wastewater from an urban treatment plant and determined the reported case count in the area was far lower than the amount of COVID-19 genetic material found in the sewage, McClatchy reported.

New Castle County, Delaware officials are following suit, collecting samples of raw sewage from the Wilmington Wastewater Treatment plant and sending them to an MIT startup, Biobot Analytics, Delaware Online reported. The startup compared the genetic material of the coronavirus in the samples to the local population data and sewage flow rates to determine how many people in the community actually have or had COVID-19, according to Delaware Online.

The startup’s analysis estimated that as of April 14, about 15,200 people had COVID-19, which is 15 times more than the number of confirmed cases in the county, Delaware Online reported.

“With wastewater, you can very quickly get a snapshot of an entire population,” Mariana Matus, co-founder of Biobot Analytics, told the LA Times. “The closest approach to replicating the data from wastewater would be to literally test every single person in a community and then take the average of that. It is very powerful.”

Coronavirus can be found in human feces, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a researcher who co-authored the first study out of MIT’s Biobot Analytics emphasized that while the virus can be detected in urine and feces, people are not at risk of getting the disease through contact with sewage, according to Newsweek.

The amount of the virus’s genetic material found in sewage can show a parallel in the timing and scale of an outbreak in ways that in-person testing can’t, the LA Times reported. That information could help public health officials safely determine when to reopen schools, restaurants and other businesses — as well as where to allocate medical supplies in a given area, according to the LA Times.

Some cities and states are beginning to relax stay-at-home orders as May approaches and researchers believe that monitoring sewage could help determine if another outbreak is on the horizon, the LA Times reported. In the past, wastewater analyses have helped catch norovirus, Hepatitis A and other diseases around the world, according to the LA Times.

This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 5:38 PM with the headline "When can we ease coronavirus quarantines? Our poop may hold the answer, studies say."