led by researchers from the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev evaluated recent studies on coronaviruses and other airborne infectious diseases, including SARS and MERS, in wastewater to weigh the threat to human health.
The study notes that it remains unclear whether treated wastewater used to fill lakes and rivers could become sources of contagion, or whether produce irrigated with wastewater and not properly disinfected could be an indirect infection route. Yet, despite researchers like Bar-Zeev sounding the alarm on the potential risks of wastewater, the World Health Organization says that to date“Given the myriad pathogens routinely expected to be found in untreated sewage and the commensurate precautions normally taken, sewage sampling in the context of COVID-19 is not expected to engender any additional infection risk to workers,” said the WHO in an Aug. 9 briefing.
Canadian researchers have also been using wastewater to track the spread of the novel coronavirus in several provinces in the hopes of expanding testing to rural areas that may not have rigorous testing capabilities.