Wastewater testing provides one more way to track COVID-19 spread

Every week a pair of workers for the Fox Metro Water Reclamation District are doing their part to track the local spread of COVID-19. But they aren’t swabbing noses or injecting vaccines.

Instead, they’re testing water in the sanitary sewer lines beneath the unincorporated Boulder Hill subdivision for levels of the virus. COVID-19 typically begins to appear in a person’s stool and urine before they start showing symptoms. That means if you keep an eye on the dirty water filling the sewer pipes below, you’ll be able to predict how case counts will move in the days ahead.

“It’s kind of a window into what’s going on with the population,” said Josie Woger, an environmental compliance technician for the Montgomery-based wastewater district.

Since June of last year, the district has been utilizing a device in a Boulder Hill sewer line that collects a 24-hour sample of the water passing through the pipes. Then each week, Woger and her colleague, Ron Reier, collect the samples and send them to a lab in Colorado for analysis.

“At the ground level, it’s pretty simple,” Woger said.

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Ron Reier, a pre-treatment specialist for the Fox Metro Water Reclamation District, opens a sewer line to remove a device that collects water samples for COVID-19 analysis. (Lucas Robinson - lrobinson@shawmedia.com)

Just like most people and institutions throughout the pandemic, the Fox Metro Water Reclamation District wanted to do its part to help, according to Assistant General Manager Karen Clementi. That led district officials to start a free trial of the water testing program last summer that has continued to do this day.

“This is all very cutting edge technology,” Clementi said. “If you look back at our data from June, we’ve picked up all those (COVID-19) spikes that we’ve seen nationwide ahead of them happening.”

The wastewater district has even noticed more recent spikes in cases. Data showed a 12% spike in virus levels in Boulder Hill earlier this month, lining up with jumps in local infections that continue.

“We’re seeing those levels increase as people are unfortunately getting sicker,” Clementi added. “So right now we’re picking up a peak.”

But are Kendall County health officials heeding this data at all?

RaeAnn VanGundy, executive director of the Kendall County Health Department, said in an email that her office has not yet used Fox Metro’s data but pledged to take a closer look.

“I will work with staff to take a deeper dive into the data and see how we may use this data to perform outreach and educational initiatives around COVID,” VanGundy wrote.

Even if the data doesn’t catch the eye of officials, the viral sewer testing market isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Biobot, the MIT-linked startup that analyzes samples for the local wastewater district, has tested its technology in 40 different states. The city of Boston even uses the company to track levels of COVID-19 variants in its sewage.

Clementi, assistant manager of the Fox Metro wastewater district, said there are early talks of establishing a statewide system of sewage tracking in Illinois.

“It’s so new that I think that they’re just now ramping up to do something really effective with this,” she said. “But if you don’t start somewhere then we would have nothing to compare back to.”