As a pilot project involving University of Guelph researchers monitoring wastewater at Toronto Pearson Airport for coronavirus variants enters its second year, one of its lead researchers says the work has grown more complicated.
As a pilot project involving University of Guelph researchers monitoring wastewater at Toronto Pearson Airport for coronavirus variants enters its second year, one of its lead researchers says the work has grown more complicated.
Dr. Lawrence Goodridge, a professor in the Ontario Agricultural College, has led U of G’s wastewater testing team in the airport project. Along with colleagues at the University of Waterloo and in collaboration with scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada, he is analyzing wastewater samples from incoming flights and terminal buildings.
The health agency announced earlier this month that it is expanding the testing project at Pearson to separately test wastewater from flights arriving from China and Hong Kong. It has also begun work with partners in British Columbia to test wastewater at Vancouver International Airport.
Wastewater has been a key tool in monitoring population-level transmission trends of the SARS Cov2 virus that causes COVID-19 since last winter, when the first wave of Omicron overwhelmed public health laboratories and led to the scaling back of community-wide clinical testing. That left wastewater testing as an important tool to estimate the risk level in a community.
Read more at University of Guelph
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