Sewage Disease Tracking: A Photographic Journey from Sewer to Lab

Virus tracking can be tricky.

Wastewater provides a solution. (All you have to do is rinse.) Here's how a scrappy team of scientists, public health experts and plumbers are embracing wastewater monitoring as the future of disease tracking.

The Covid-19 pandemic has turned wastewater into gold.

People infected with the coronavirus shed the pathogen in their stool. By measuring and sequencing viral material in sewage, scientists can determine whether cases are increasing in a particular area and which variants are circulating.

People shed the virus even if they never seek testing or treatment. Wastewater monitoring has therefore become an essential tool for keeping tabs on the virus, especially as Covid-19 testing has increasingly moved to the home.

Institutions and localities that have invested in wastewater monitoring over the past two years are discovering that it can also be used to track other health threats. The Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network has already started tracking the monkeypox virus in sewage. And last week, New York City officials announced that polio had been detected in the city's sewage.

Six months ago, NYC Health + Hospitals, a large local health system, began piloting its own sewage monitoring system to track coronavirus and influenza. Surveillance for monkeypox and poliomyelitis will begin next week. There are a variety of approaches to wastewater monitoring. Here's a visual guide to how the coronavirus tracking process works at a New York City hospital.

Part 1: In the basement of the hospital

In which the toilet is flushed, the sewage flows through a basement pipe and two intrepid scientists come to collect it.

New York City...