How To Test Everyone — Thru Poop

Three studies on detecting COVID-19 in wastewater

You are what you excrete

How do you test everyone for COVID-19, all the time, and anonymously? Well, everybody poops.

Three recent studies have tested entire populations in Amsterdam, Paris, and Massachusetts for COVID-19. These cheap, simple wastewater tests have shown when the virus started spreading, when it started accelerating, and when regular testing was missing something.

Your poop is anonymized in the flush, so it cannot tell if you have COVID, it can tell public health officials when and where an outbreak is starting, so they can deploy scarce PCR testing strategically. In fact, wastewater testing could be used for future epidemics, for viruses and bacteria we haven’t even heard of yet. All you need is a fragment of the target RNA and 250ml of murky water. It’s a big data dump that we’re literally just sitting on.

Here’s how it works.

Wastewater Monitoring

Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

If a virus is in your body, it’s likely coming out of your butt. Even diluted, a simple test can find RNA fragments miles downstream in wastewater. This…