jschramm@minotdailynews.com
North Dakota researchers testing wastewater in Minot and other communities for COVID-19 are continuing to see correlations between their test results and actual clinical cases identified by the North Dakota Department of Health.
“The wastewater trends pretty closely with the amount of clinical cases that are reported by the DoH,” said James Uhlman, program manager for the wastewater sampling project in the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality. “We actually saw a lot of correlation as the clinical cases declined as well.”
Wastewater results have been found to show increases and decreases slightly ahead of Department of Health numbers, indicating somewhat earlier detection. Minot’s November peak occurred from Nov. 3-18 in wastewater samples, after which time there was a decline.