Bartelt-Hunt searching sewage for COVID-19

Every Thursday morning, before most of campus is awake, University of Nebraska–Lincoln engineer Shannon Bartelt-Hunt and a small team of graduate students and building systems personnel can be found at various campus sites, lifting manhole covers and collecting sewage samples.

They’re on the hunt for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

After collection, the samples are processed by separating the solid material from the wastewater. The virus is extracted from the solids and then analyzed by a method called reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction — or RT-PCR — similar to how individual swab tests are run. Bartelt-Hunt is collaborating with public health and infectious disease researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on the analysis.

The project is not intended to track the spread of COVID-19 on campus. Rather, it is part of a larger research project Bartelt-Hunt is conducting with UNMC into the feasibility of using wastewater testing for surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in Nebraska. It also is contributing to a body of research that may establish wastewater testing as an additional tool for communitywide surveillance to predict clusters or outbreaks, before they show up through individual swab tests.

Read the full story from University of Nebraska-Lincoln here.