I know that sounds disgusting, but one of my colleagues at the University of Georgia and her team have developed a method to track COVID-19 in near “real-time” through wastewater. While you probably learned about the water cycle in school (evaporation, precipitation, runoff, condensation, and so forth), it is unlikely that you are as familiar with the urban water cycle. The graphic below is a good illustration of the urban water cycle found on the U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA) website. The urban water cycle EPAErin Lipp is a professor of environmental health science in the University of Georgia College of Public Health. They use a technique that involves extracting SARS-CoV-2 virus RNA from sewage samples.

Source: Forbes September 06, 2020 12:11 UTC