Last week, we told you about Kando, an Israeli wastewater control company that made a pilot assignment for SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus lines in the Ashkelon Municipal Sewer system.
The first findings were published on 30 July. The effects recommend that tracking the remains of coronavirus in the sewer formula is a more timely and effective measure of the magnitude of epidemics than testing in Americans, especially since many other people have no symptoms or have delayed symptoms of Covid-19.
“Monitoring our sewers is like doing a city’s ‘blood test’,” said Ari Goldfarb, Kando’s executive director, who teamed up with scientists at Technion and Ben-Gurion University to design the pilot.
“The initial positive effects of this pilot study demonstrate that our complicated wastewater monitoring systems can help find new epidemics and precisely where and their severity,” he said.
By alerting the municipal government and providing actionable information, Goldfarb continued, “Our hope is that cities around the world will avoid large blockades and mitigate long-term epidemics.”
The coast of the city of Ashkelon (population 150,000) has been selected as a pilot because it is intended to have a small number of cases, in addition to housing in the “coronavirus hotels” of the city that recover patients from Covid-19.
To their surprise, researchers found vital coronavirus remains in municipal sewage, indicating early detection of outbreaks in local neighborhoods.
“Identifying coronavirus lines in the city’s wastewater is incredibly complicated because the other ingredients provided in sewer systems, adding commercial wastewater, can dilute or destroy the remains of the virus,” said Professor Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health. Ben-Gurion.
“Our unique method allows us to trip and hint at the presence of the virus and calculate its concentration with the ingredients taken into account in the equation, and incorporate epidemiological evidence to identify emerging hot spots in Covid-19. This will allow the government to take steps to involve long-term outbreaks. »
The Kando includes input from experts in disciplines such as virology, water engineering, medicine, epidemiology, biostatistics and public fitness policy.
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Abigail Klein Leichman is associate editor of ISRAEL21c. Prior to moving to Israel in 2007, she was an industry and editor at a primary newspaper in New Jersey and has worked as a freelancer for a variety of newspapers and periodicals since 1984.