DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
Wastewater provides a clue to virus transmission.
In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, finding ways to improve testing has been key to addressing the spread of disease. While much effort has focused on testing individual people, scientists have begun to explore large-scale sampling of wastewater to understand patterns of viral transmission over larger areas.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are participating in a pilot study to sample wastewater at some of the Chicago area s wastewater treatment plants. This technique is very versatile, Grippo said. It s not going to stop COVID-19, but it is going to give us another tool in our toolkit to grapple with it.