Biobot: Wastewater Tracking of COVID-19

We are excited to announce that Fox Metro Water Reclamation District has recently partnered with Cambridge, MA-based Biobot Analytics to deploy their wastewater-based technology in our sewage system to anonymously track the spread of COVID-19 in our community.

We have been collecting data from the Boulder Hill Interceptor as a baseline residential area since late May.  We are hoping to develop the relationship between COVID-19 infection rates and levels in the wastewater to use it as a future prediction tool.  This data is being supplied to the Kendall County Health Department also.

Biobot’s technology measures levels of SARS-CoV-2, which is shed in the stool of Covid-19 patients, present in wastewater. They analyze sewage to determine the presence of infected individuals and estimate the number of cases. This will help Fox Metro WRD analyze trends in infection rates to inform reopening strategies, detect outbreaks early, and test at scale for much cheaper than mass individual testing.  Now, we have an early warning system that can alert us to emerging outbreaks and get a much better vantage point, supported by real-time data, into the prevalence of COVID-19 in our community. For more information, you can visit www.biobot.io and watch their short video explaining wastewater epidemiology below.

 

Aurora, North Aurora, Boulder Hill, Montgomery, Oswego, Sugar Grove and portions of Yorkville and Batavia

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