With provinces no longer using PCR testing for most cases, testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 has become an increasingly important form of COVID surveillance
CentrEAU-COVID that tested sewage water was able to detect rising levels of coronavirus in populations up to five days before clinical tests and signal presence of new variants
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Every time Dominic Frigon flushes a toilet, he thinks about the roughly 100 people across the province that he supervises to collect, sort and analyze wastewater for traces of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Frigon, an assistant professor at McGill’s environmental engineering department, is the co-ordinator of CentrEAU-COVID, a project comprised of experts from across the province analyzing samples of sewage water in five regions of Quebec.
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The group relies on municipal workers within the regions of Montreal, Laval, Capitale-Nationale, Bas-St-Laurent and Mauricie/Centre-du-Québec to provide them with samples collected over the course of each day. They then filter the water, run it through centrifuges, extract RNA and test it for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.