Hamilton to make wastewater data related to COVID-19 available starting Friday
CBC
Hamilton announced it will make its wastewater data available to the public, after months of saying the data was a "lagging indicator" when it came to monitoring the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community.
Starting Friday, the city will publish data corresponding to COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and their wastewater "viral signal" on its Status of Cases dashboard online.
"These updates and enhancements to COVID-19 data are consistent with the City of Hamilton's commitment to transparency and sharing relevant and timely COVID-19 data with the community," said the city in a statement Thursday.
But, while the city says it will continue to seek "to understand the relationship between wastewater trends and other metrics such as hospitalization," it maintained that "it's not something that has worked as a predictive measure in Hamilton to date," the statement read.
The move comes after experts such as Robert Delatolla, who leads the research into wastewater testing in Hamilton and other cities, said the data is a "remarkable indicator" of the city's case count.
As recently as Monday, during a COVID-19 update briefing, the city's COVID-19 operations chief Michelle Baird doubled down on the city's view that wastewater data was not useful to share publicly, saying percent positivity was still the more accurate indicator.
"We certainly have been looking at this data and trying to understand its local application … we have some other indicators that have been more predictive for us in Hamilton," she said.
That echoed comments from the city to CBC Hamilton as early as January, when it said "due to the variability of the wastewater data Hamilton Public Health Services has assessed to date, it does not support a greater understanding of the COVD-19 pandemic locally."
Delatolla previously explained to CBC how the process works, saying:
"The people that are sick with COVID, like with many other diseases, shed it … and anything that's wasted goes through the sink or goes through the toilet in our homes as wastewater."
"[It] ends up within this infrastructure within the city, these underground pipes. Because it's basically shared genetic code … the virus can be tracked and can be measured within the wastewater, so that's basically what we're doing and you can do that in a lot of different ways."
He said he and his team have been working "really closely" with Hamilton's Public Works employees and others and measuring the wastewater signal at Woodward and Dundas wastewater treatment plants.
He added that this process can not only be done city-wide but can also be narrowed down to neighbourhoods and even long-term facilities to predict an outbreak.
Other cities, such as Toronto, Brantford, London and Waterloo Region have already made wastewater data public and are using it to monitor COVID-19 levels in their regions.
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