Testing environmental water to monitor COVID-19 spread in unsheltered encampments

To better understand COVID-19's spread during the pandemic, public health officials have expanded wastewater surveillance. These efforts track SARS-CoV-2 levels and health risks among most people, but they miss people who live without shelter, a population particularly vulnerable to severe infection.

To fill this information gap, researchers reporting in Environmental Science & Technology Letters tested flood-control waterways near unsheltered encampments, finding similar transmission patterns as in the broader community and identifying previously unseen viral mutations.

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SARS-CoV-2 RNA can persist in blood, tissue, may play role in long COVID, research suggests The probability of having persistent viral fragments was about double in hospitalized participants and in those who reported being very ill but weren't hospitalized. CIDRAP

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