Here are some loaded, but good news. Our feces could actually be our best hope to efficiently detect COVID-19 outbreaks all across the globe, in a timely manner. This is because the novel coronavirus can be detected in feces even faster than people can be tested for the virus. Various German institutes and a number of public works in cities such as Leipzig are currently in the middle of a historic trial. These experiments hope to find the virus in the wastewater and identify new epidemics before they spiral out of control.
Dr. Ulrich Meyer, the technical director of the Leipzig Waterworks, recently expressed his opinion in an interview. He said that, if we were able to figure out what the concentration of coronavirus is in the wastewater, we could find a way to calculate how many infected people there are in the city of Leipzig. This strategy could perhaps be one of the most interesting ones when it comes to coronavirus fighting techniques.
Germany is one of the countries that are currently trying to see how they can use the data collected from water sewage to create a sort of early system for COVID-19. Fred Pleitgen, affiliated with CNN, has declared that researchers discovered very early in the pandemic that COVID-19 can really be traced in human feces. The question that rises, however, is whether this can be done on a regular automated basis and whether the results can apply to an entire country, not just a specific region.
Rene Kallies, a virologist working for the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Studies, is trying to do that very thing. She has explained that they have liters of waste, which they are trying to extract RNA from. This is certainly a challenge, but, if the experiment succeeds, authorities could be able to allow authorities to figure out and react to new outbreaks.
