The data is the first indicator case numbers could be going up.
Since last fall, OU researchers have been testing the sewer water in many municipalities and the University of Oklahoma for COVID particles.
“We’ve got this two-week lead time before the county health departments are aware of an outbreak occurring,” said Halley Reeves, VP of Community Health Impact at OU Health.
The concentration levels detected went down in the metro in January and stayed that way until the past couple of weeks.
“We’ve noticed in areas, pockets, that numbers have gone back up. That’s cause for concern,” said Bradley Stevenson, an associate professor in microbiology at OU.
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“Our particular congregation has been impacted by COVID,” he said. “We could look at these five deaths that have occurred over the last year attributed to COVID. We even had two mysterious deaths that occurred before they started counting.”
Terrell and his wife, Beverly, went to one of the local vaccination clinics that Oklahoma-City County Health Department sponsored. This one took place in late March at Star Spencer High School, in northeast Oklahoma City, a historically Black community. The department worked with more than a dozen churches in the area to coordinate sign ups in their congregations.
The McCoys say they wanted to lead by example, and show what a blessing the vaccine can be. And to remind people this isn’t their first rodeo with shots.
For Voice of Hope pastor Terrell McCoy, the fight against the coronavirus is personal.
“Our particular congregation has been impacted by COVID,” he said. “We could look at these five deaths that have occurred over the last year attributed to COVID. We even had two mysterious deaths that occurred before they started counting.”
Terrell and his wife, Beverly, went to one of the local vaccination clinics that Oklahoma-City County Health Department sponsored. This one took place in late March at Star Spencer High School, in northeast Oklahoma City, a historically Black community. The department worked with more than a dozen churches in the area to coordinate sign ups in their congregations.
Oklahoma COVID wastewater testing shows increase in disease presence
COVID wastewater testing in Tulsa
and last updated 2021-04-06 12:46:05-04
TULSA, Okla. â Murky, smelly wastewater is what Oklahoma researchers are using to test for COVID.
A team is taking the unique approach at the University of Oklahoma. Wastewater testing allows the OU team to gather COVID data one week earlier than human testing.
âWe excrete COVID through going to the toilet. So, itâs discharged into the toilet and then itâs found in the sewage system, said Halley Reeves, vice president of Community Health Impact for OU Medicine. Our teams will go out to manholes or wastewater treatment facilities and extract the sample.
More houses of worship are partnering with health agencies to help broaden accessibility to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Two Oklahoma City churches, OKC First Church of the Nazarene and Emmanuel Tabernacle, hosted vaccine pods on Saturday.
The Rev. Jeffery Goldsmith, senior pastor of Emmanuel Tabernacle, said his church, 1015 NW 96, is affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World denomination, with about 25 churches in the state, eight of them in the metro area. He said he has served as the denomination's bishop since 2017 and his church is the faith group's state headquarters.
The minister and several other pastors in the predominantly Black denomination were vaccinated publicly on Saturday at the vaccination pod.