Tag Archives: Wastewater

This Definitely Adds A New Twist To The Discussion

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On Thursday, The New York Post posted an article about an interesting discovery related to the coronavirus.

The article reports:

Coronavirus was detected in Massachusetts sewage at higher levels than expected, suggesting there are many more undiagnosed patients than previously known, according to a new study.

Researchers from biotech startup Biobot Analytics collected samples from a wastewater facility for an unnamed metropolitan area in late March, according to a report Tuesday on medRxiv.

The virus has a very specific genetic make-up that allows scientists to identify it.

The article details the results of the study:

“Even if those viral particles are no longer active or capable of infecting humans, they may still carry genetic material that can be detected using an approach called PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which amplifies the genetic signal many orders of magnitude, creating billions of copies of the genome for each starting virus,” Alm told the outlet.

The researchers, along with a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, analyzed the samples and found the number of coronavirus particles equated with 2,300 people being infected with the virus.

 But at the time of tests, there were only 446 confirmed cases in the region, according to the study.

“It was interesting that our estimation was definitely higher than the number of confirmed cases in the area,” said Mariana Matus, CEO and co-founder of Biobot, according to Stat News.

The good news in this study is that we may be developing ‘herd immunity’ to this virus that will make it much less dangerous in the future. When you combine that fact with the fact that we may have a cure, this is very good news for everyone who has been impacted by either the virus or the shutdown.

Government By The People At Work

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Last night I attended a Town Meeting in my town in Massachusetts. As of the 2010 census, the town had a population of about eight thousand people. Because this was a special town meeting called to address a specific financial issue, about 500 people showed up (usually about 200 or 300 show up).

The issue causing the controversy was how to finance sewers that the town was installing.

Last June, the town voted to put sewer lines in some areas of the town that do not have public sewers. Included in that Article was the amendment to the article which stated:

100% by betterment to the bettered properties in this area as the funding locally and contingent upon successful funding from SRF Massachusetts DEP and or USDA-RD loans and or grants.

What happened was that no loans or grants came through, and the sewers were going to have to be totally paid for by the 155 town residents they impacted–not just the sewer hook-up–the actual sewer. Those 155 residents had received letters telling them that the town was putting $25,000 tax liens on their property, plus they were going to be required to hook into the new system at their own expense.

The residents of the town at the meeting voted 317-225 to pay for the cost of the sewers with a property tax increase for everyone in the town (a cost of approximately $62 annually per residence). Although I would have liked to have seen the cost split between the homeowners effected and the town, I was happy with the outcome. However, there are a few things here to take note of.

The sewer project has already started. It is not practical finacially to try to stop it. However, it seems to me that when it became obvious that the loans and grants were not forthcoming, there should have been a town meeting to vote on whether or not to undertake the project. The project was supposed to be contingent upon those loans and grants; obviously it was not. Public sewers are an asset to a community, and I suspect that the government will someday get around to requiring them, so putting in sewers is not a bad thing. I suspect, however, that the way this was done may cause some people who have never been involved in local politics in the past to be more involved in the future. That is a good thing.

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