Sewage surveillance to track COVID-19

Scientists around the world have discovered that waste-water testing can serve as a cost-effective early warning system

Karnataka government launched a sewage surveillance project in Bengaluru to track the emergence and resolution of COVID-19 clusters. The project has been launched in 45 wards and will soon be extended to other parts of the city. The first such pan-city project in Asia, it will be be spearheaded by COVIDactionCollab (CAC), a nationwide network of over 300 organisations working on COVID-19 relief and recovery, and supported by Skoll Foundation and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Dr. Angela Chaudhuri, Health Lead, CAC, said, “While there have been many experiments and studies on finding traces of the COVID-19 virus in sewage, Bengaluru will be joining the Netherlands, Finland, and Israel in a path-breaking surveillance system with experts from all over the world supporting the initiative.”