Nick Komasinski is preparing a sample of Bloomington’s wastewater to be sent off to a lab in Tennessee for analysis.
“So, I’ve got our jar of raw wastewater here; I’m gonna go ahead and shake it up a bit, but not too vigorously,” Komasinski said.
He’s taking all the precautions you’d expect when handling raw sewage water.
“Especially working with samples like this,you want to make sure you’re washing your hands and wearing gloves,” he said.
Komasinski is part of a team at the city’s Dillman Road and Blucher Poole waste treatment plants that collects wastewater three times a week to be tested for COVID-19.
The wastewater is poured into a 100-milliliter bottle, tested for pH balance, and its temperature logged.
“When things are stabilized, you should see that checkmark appear and then I will press something on screen to freeze that result,” he said. “And then I'll go ahead and enter the data over the phone.”
The bottle is then put in a cooler and shipped off for analysis.
One of the samples – collected on Mondays – is sent to Microbac Laboratories. That data is used by the city in its analysis of COVID spread in the community. Samples are also collected Tuesdays and Thursdays and sent to a lab in Boston to be entered into a national database.
“It’s something we’ve been working on for going on two full years now, which is going to be a pretty robust data set,” said Jason Wenning, the pretreatment coordinator for City of Bloomington Utilities. He oversees the city’s industrial and commercial wastewater programs.
But the data, for now, can’t be used solely to guide the city’s COVID policy. That’s because the sample size covers a large area, and it can take a couple days to get the data back from the lab.
“For us, it is additional information to watch,” said Penny Caudill, the Monroe County Health Administrator. “At this time it doesn’t provide absolute information, so we can’t make decisions based on this data.
“What we can do is monitor the sampling results against reporting data, and hospitalizations to look for possible patterns. It is interesting, and I believe it will be more valuable as we move forward.”
Graham McKeen, the assistant director of public and environmental health at IU, has been monitoring the wastewater results, as well.
“It is a great tool to get that early data,” McKeen said. “And, so if you can get the turnaround time down low, you can get a heads up of three to maybe up to 11 days advance notice of what you’re seeing in those trends of community spread.”
And those few days of warning can help a community decide to increase testing, suggest mask wearing or give healthcare systems a preview of what’s coming.
“Also, you can use this to tell us when we’ve peaked, when we’re on the decline, and that’s really informative, too,” McKeen said. “The other huge advantage I see of this, especially now, is we’re getting these sub-variants (of COVID 19) coming at us very fast. And they’re smashing together.
“You can actually take this wastewater and sequence it immediately and greatly reduce the time it would take to get sequencing back from a clinical specimen.”
Bloomington has been at the forefront of wastewater COVID testing. The city began exploring the process in June 2020 and that month joined 13 other communities in the state for the Indiana Wastewater Monitoring Program.
Funded by the Indiana Finance Authority, the program allowed the city to test eight sites twice a week. Doing that much testing confirmed spread at a neighborhood level that mirrored COVID testing results.
“We saw very matched up data, at least in the trend line of cases within our student population, especially in the fall of 2020, especially around the dormitories and the Greek houses, and what they were seeing in those same neighborhoods that they were collecting,” McKeen said. “So that really showed us the potential of it.”
But that program lasted only until the end of 2020. Since then, the city has been footing the bill and cut back testing to just once a week at the two treatment plants. Wenning says testing will likely extend through the end of 2022.
“It was important for us to get out in front of it, to try to gather data wherever we could,” Wenning said. “Sampling for COVID in wastewater based on epidemiology as a practice was incredibly new at the start of the pandemic and still a very much fresh field.”
Fresh is what you could call the pool of wastewater the samples are taken from. A unit where the water enters the plant collects a small volume of wastewater every 15 minutes over a 24-hour period.
At the Dillman Road plant, that time frame is midnight to midnight and is collected daily to test the water for E-P-A and other regulations. The same water is used for COVID testing.
“The team that’s been working on it here, we’re very proud of about that,” Wenning said. “Part of working in wastewater is public health and we’re happy to contribute however we can.”
McKeen said IU is looking to partner with C-B-U to provide wastewater testing, which could increase the number and frequency of sites being tested and the improve the turnaround time of results.
“If we could start being the lab for the city and testing the Dillman and Blucher with these PC machines we’re purchasing … you can basically get a two-hour turnaround time on sample results,” McKeen said. “So that’s where we think we could really benefit the community.”
