COVID testing doesn't tell the full story, so Chicago health officials use data from UIC's wastewater analysis to track coronavirus in the city.
CHICAGO -- Throughout the pandemic, work on wastewater inside a University of Illinois at Chicago lab has track COVID case trends for the Chicago Department of Public Health.
"Wastewater is a good way to track COVID because essentially everybody poops," said Dr. Isaac Ghanni, CDPH Medical Director Testing-Laboratory Based Surveillance."If you have COVID there will be some in stool and if we test wastewater we can hopefully find it.""Many of these rapid tests you can buy over the counter, they are not reported to public health so this is a way to approximate all those people," Ghanni explained.
The samples are collected from Chicago's water treatment plants and from seven community locations. All the data is submitted to the CDC. On Friday, the federal agency added wastewater data to its national COVID tracker. "It's meant to be an additional extra piece of information that we can access with the rest of our data points and have a better understanding of the pandemic," said Ghanni."Some places we get a little bit of lead time so seeing increases before clinical cases and some places it matches," said Dr. Rachel Poretsy, UIC."They'll do things like deploy mobile vaccination clinics or they can increase testing frequency or more availability," Portesky said.
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