Researchers studying the presence of the virus causing COVID-19 in local wastewater say the amount of Omicron variant detected in the water has increased rapidly over the past few weeks.
Mark Servos, the Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection, said Omicron spread appeared in wastewater far faster than any other variant to date.
"It just went up so dramatically, so quickly," he said at Waterloo Region's weekly COVID-19 update on Friday. "It was stunning."
Servos and Meghan Fuzzen, a researcher from the University of Waterloo, both discussed the wastewater findings at Friday's update. They monitor samples from water treatment plants in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge.
Fuzzen said the latest samples are at the highest end of what they are able to measure, adding that around 80 per cent of the detected samples are the Omicron variant, as opposed to Delta. According to their presentation, the wastewater signal has increased dramatically over the past few weeks and is now as much as 10 times higher than in any of the previous waves.
"Seeing something so rapidly increasing was almost frightening," Servos said.
Servos added that while the tool has helped detect the rise in Omicron, it will also play a large role in detecting when cases start to go down.
"It's still a serious situation that we're in," he said. "Wastewater, hopefully, will trend with the actual cases, even if we can't catch every single clinical case. The wastewater may be an early indicator of the decline of Omicron."
With limited eligibility for PCR testing in Ontario, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang said monitoring wastewater can be a valuable tool for public health.
"What it's really saying right now is that the number of clinical cases that we're detecting, especially because we’re only testing individuals in high-risk settings, they are only a fraction of the number of infections," Dr. Wang said. "That's what this information from the wastewater is telling us."
