CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas —
Experts say wastewater might be an effective way to track COVID-19 outbreaks in cities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently working with city health departments to monitor the virus in its wastewater. Corpus Christi was initially one of the cities taking part in the National Wastewater Surveillance System.
“We sort of jumped on that bandwagon," said Michael Murphy Chief Operating Officer of Corpus Christi Water Utilities. "We did some testing. We tried it, but it didn’t really do anything. I mean, our results were inconclusive.”
Corpus Christi Water Utilities tested water at at least two different plants for COVID-19 when the pandemic began in 2020. Murphy said the results were not worth the effort.
“It was a lot of effort and it wasn’t all the expensive," Murphy said. "I can’t remember what we paid for those test kits but it wasn’t that expensive. But, it was, we didn’t really see any benefit from it, so we just dropped that program.”
Cities like Houston are using the partnership between its health district and the CDC to track what sections of the city are seeing the most cases. Corpus Christi plans to continue its normal monitoring of wastewater for red flags.
“As you can imagine, what comes through the wastewater system, we treat for pretty much everything." Murphy said. "So, that would’ve been, we think that whatever was in there would be captured in our pretreatment process anyhow. So, just didn’t see any benefit from it.”
The wastewater monitoring helps identify variants like Omicron in cities, too. However, there are no plans to test for COVID-19 in wastewater again in the Coastal Bend.
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