Edwin Oh, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine sanitizes a pole with a container attached after his team demonstrates their process for collecting a wastewater sample at UNLV Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022 | 9:22 a.m.
Four Las Vegas agencies are collaborating on a new wastewater surveillance dashboard to track emerging cases of COVID-19 in Clark County.
Led by UNLV, the Southern Nevada Health District, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Desert Research Institute, the program monitors the county's wastewater and sewage, which contains the excrement of people who have contracted the virus, symptomatic or not, SNHD said today in a press release.
This gives researchers and public health officials a preliminary awareness of Clark County's COVID-19 levels or potential future surges — before those infected take a COVID-19 test. The dashboard will be updated weekly and builds on existing research conducted throughout the pandemic.
"The daily and weekly analyses of these samples will help keep us one step ahead of emerging pathogens and variants,” said Edwin Oh, an associate professor at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV who was among the first to discover the omicron variant in Clark County, said in a statement. Oh directed manhole research throughout the pandemic and advocated for its widespread use.
Wastewater surveillance also indicates to health officials when, for example, a surge may be decreasing. The data cannot, however, tab the number of people in the county that are currently infected, and it will not be the lone method of tracking COVID-19 cases, the health district stated.
“As we move into the next stage of our response to COVID-19, wastewater surveillance is going to be a powerful tool for detecting potential surges in new cases or the presence of new variants in our community," Cassius Lockett, director of Disease Surveillance and Control for the health district, said in the statement. "We will be able to alert the public in a timelier manner and support public health mitigation measures that can help slow the spread of the virus."
This surveillance program will be updated in addition to SNHD’s recently scaled-down COVID-19 case counts, which earlier this month was adjusted from daily updates to weekly reports.
