How Yale monitors COVID-19 surges in Connecticut’s wastewater

Pandemics present a unique civic challenge for public health officials. How do you monitor infection levels in large groups of people who are very close together in a repeatable way, using limited labor and reagents? The answer lies beneath our feet. Sewers carry the viral components shed by infected individuals to wastewater treatment plants, where those components settle with solid waste into an unsavory but informative component: sludge.