Posted on January 23
Since PCR tests are no longer offered to everyone, we do not know the level of COVID-19 among the population. Do you know if, as in Boston, the government or the City of Montreal are thinking of using sewer analysis in order to know the evolution of the current variant and the overall evolution of the contamination?
Paul Dion
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Quebec state has shown an obvious reluctance to adopt new tools (such as rapid tests) to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Detection of the virus in sewage is the most recent example. And, unfortunately, we are paying the price today.
The case is supremely ironic. We had a pilot project in this direction, called CentrEAU-COVID. Coordinated by researchers from McGill and Laval University, it has been deployed in Montreal, Quebec City, Laval and a few other municipalities. And it gave interesting results.
The catch: its funding died out… just when its usefulness would have been greatest.
A lack of vision, you say?
The last wastewater sample was analyzed by CentrEAU-COVID researchers on December 17 in Montreal, in the midst of the rise of the Omicron wave.
Two weeks later, the authorities announced the cessation of PCR tests in the population. Result: today, the government has no idea of the prevalence of the virus in the population, and it sails by sight to try to guess when the peak will occur.
CentrEAU-COVID had however proven itself. Wastewater monitoring, for example, detected the third wave in Quebec City before PCR tests. It is that by going to the toilet, infected people excrete the virus even before having symptoms.
By taking samples directly from the exits of homeless shelters, the researchers were also able to detect outbreaks there. Combined with a deployment of rapid tests, the approach made it possible to quickly isolate the people affected. This could be useful in prisons and CHSLDs, in particular.
No one claims that the method is perfect. But combined with other analyses, detection by wastewater can provide valuable additional information.
The costs ? They are absolutely ridiculous. Dominic Frigon of McGill University is one of the project’s co-directors. He claims that you can follow the evolution of the viral load in a city like Montreal for… $500 a day. A single PCR test costs between $55 and $102, according to data published by Radio-Canada.
Seeing their funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec running out, the researchers lobbied last fall for Quebec to take up the torch. After all, they had done their part of the job: to demonstrate the validity of the method. They were ready to train researchers from the public network and to make their laboratories available to the government for analyses. A handful of regional public health departments supported them.
But the Ministry of Health opposed them to an end of inadmissibility.
Meanwhile, as of March 2021, Ontario was releasing $12 million to create a sewage-based COVID surveillance network. The European Union adopted a recommendation to this effect at the same time. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established a national detection network as early as fall 2020.
Today, the INSPQ gave birth to a favorable report on the detection of COVID-19 by wastewater. In Quebec, we are told that there is now a “great political will to pursue this approach”.
So much the better if we turn around. But one day we will have to question our mistrust in trying new tools in our fight against COVID-19.