TACOMA, Wash. _ Down a gravel pathway, past a scattering of needle caps and food wrappers and beneath a graffiti-sprayed overpass for Tacoma's East 32nd Street, lies a portal into the public's health.
For millennia, sewer systems have carried off waste and disease. More recently, they've drawn coronavirus-searching scientists in their wake.
On a Friday last month, Chad Atkinson, a senior environmental technician for Tacoma, lifted up a maintenance hole cover with a metal hook.
The stench of decomposition pricked the nostrils as a flashlight beam illuminated a stream of untreated wastewater flowing past globs of fatty muck below. The waste of some 17,000 Tacoma residents drains through this site, including sewage from several retirement communities and the nearby Emerald Queen Casino.
Senior environmental specialist Steve Shortencarrier jabbed an extendible pole into the sanitary sewer, rubbed an attached shop towel on the sludge and pulled it to the surface.
Then, Gina Chang, a student intern volunteering with a nearby biotech laboratory, dabbed and twisted a pair of swabs on the soiled towel, before snapping the samples off into vials with preservative liquid for testing.
"The nastier, the better," Chang said of the samples. "If it's ripe, it's good."
Chang is one of many researchers involved in an international and fast-developing hunt for sewer system clues to the virus that causes COVID-19. Scientists say developing methods to test and track remnants of the virus in wastewater and sewer sludge could help build an early warning system for future COVID-19 outbreaks, help epidemiologists understand trends in infection and lead to a better understanding of the virus's reach in communities with less access to clinical testing.
Researchers have monitored for viruses like polio in wastewater for years, but the coronavirus is new, and while studies indicate scientists can find its genetic fingerprints, they're still sorting out what that means and how it could help contain the disease.
"COVID-19 is in our community and circulating the drainage in our sewer," said David Hirschberg, founder of the RAIN Incubator for biotechnology, which is leading the testing in Tacoma. With that information, "What do you do now?"
