Now that so much testing for COVID-19 is done through home kits and cannot be officially tracked through lab reports, the presence of the virus in wastewater has become an important indicator of its presence in the Santa Barbara community.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, the city’s wastewater division at El Estero Water Resource Center incorporated testing for the virus into its routine water-quality examinations, said Amanda Flesse, head of the wastewater system. “We’d been following the progress of the disease in China and Europe,” she said, “and in January 2020, a lot of European countries began testing their wastewater.” The City of Santa Barbara followed suit.
At first, Flesse’s team used a trial program that was available for free, but the results were not verifiable, she said, and they didn’t feel confident about distributing those numbers. By June or July, they’d found a verified lab in Florida the city could afford, and they’ve sent a composite sample across the country once a week ever since. Those results are now posted at a dashboard, but they also go for analysis to groups of medical doctors, researchers, and scientists at County Public Health, UC Santa Barbara, and Cottage Health, including Dr. Lynn Fitzgibbons, an expert in infectious diseases.