Spatial and Temporal, Small and Big: Using wastewater data to monitor the spread of Covid-19
Have you been monitoring the news about Covid-19 obsessively? And wondering when the economy will open and if it’s safe to go out and resume normal activities? If you have, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about how testing people to detect the presence of the virus, tracing the spread through contacts and monitoring outbreak clusters, is critical to being able to tell how the pandemic is progressing and if it’s safe to resume normal activities and thus open up the economy. But in many countries, including the United States, testing has been a bottleneck - either there haven’t been enough tests or the infection has spread to such an extent that actually testing people and tracing their contacts simply isn’t feasible anymore. Further, even in countries like Germany and South Korea that have successfully deployed testing and tracing strategies, it is still expensive to conduct these tests and continue tracing contacts. And until a vaccine and/or some form of treatment is develo