BOISE, Idaho — It is likely you have seen a coworker out on sick leave recently. Between influenza, RSV, and Covid, more people have been getting sick this time of year.
Soon, the City of Boise will be able to track trends in all of those viruses.
Since the spring of 2020, the city's Public Works Department has been testing samples from its two wastewater facilities to give them insight on COVID in the community.
"It was one of the many tools that we were able to share with the hospitals in the health systems to be able to understand what was spreading and how quickly through the community," Natalie Monro, communications manager for Boise Public Works said.
Boise will start a program in January that will allow them to test wastewater for other viruses in addition to Covid and its variants. Including the flu, RSV, and monkeypox.
"And then we're able to add in other parameters as the need comes up," Monro said. "So if there's some new virus that's coming through, we're able to add that into the testing as well."
Samples of raw wastewater coming into the facilities will be sampled and tested. The samples taken allow the city to track trends to better understand how a virus is spreading through the community.
"At the wastewater, we have the ability to test an aggregate, so how much virus is everybody shedding. So we'll be able to test that wastewater to see how much it's spreading, and it's usually what we call a leading indicator," Monro said. "So we get indications about how much virus is in the community, usually a couple of days before testing is able to show up in hospitals."
The city is working with Verily, a life sciences research organization that is owned by Alphabet. They conduct testing with other cities across the United States, including Coeur d'Alene.
Verily will be paying the City of Boise for its samples. Boise will ship samples three times per week when the program starts.
Once data starts being collected, people will be able to go online to check levels and charts to see information about what's spreading.
"They maintain dashboards for a lot of cities where people can just log on and check the levels themselves and see how things are spreading around," Monro said. "They've got a pretty cool user interface system. So we're excited to be able to have that as a resource for our community."
For the CDC's 48th Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Idaho had 453 positive RSV tests, down from 535 the week prior. More data on RSV and influenza trends from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare can be found here.
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