The level of COVID-19 in Chautauqua County is quite low right now — demonstrated not by the number of sick people, but by sewers serving a major part of the county's population.
Sewers can be an effective tool for checking for human waste products. It's been long used for analyzing prescription drug use.
Now, testing sewers for COVID has become an increasingly-used tool to monitor the virus. New York State has done a lot of this through SUNY branches like Upstate Medical School and the University at Buffalo. There has been a significant amount of testing in sewers in Erie County and the tested materials have been used to look for virus variants.
UB is now testing sewer waste water from the Jamestown and Dunkirk sewers and, new this week, the Chautauqua County Health Department began including those results in its COVID figures: 3 people hospitalized, 1.6% 7-day average and a "low" community level.
County Epidemiologist Breeanne Agett said it's a universal tool and better than testing person by person.
"It's not biased by human behavior or by access to testing," Agett said. "At this time, we know that our case numbers that we're seeing at the state level, that are coming in through the lab reports, that only includes individuals who are tested in a lab. So if somebody is tested with a rapid test at home, they don't report the result. That's not going to be included in those numbers or somebody doesn't get tested at all or they're not symptomatic."
Agett said this testing ability was not available at the beginning of the pandemic.
"At the local level, at the regional level, the state level, decisions could have been based on what those virus levels looked like in the wastewater in the community, rather than the testing that was going on," she said.
Agett said samples are taken once a week in the Jamestown and Dunkirk sewer systems and sent to UB. While not covering all the county's population, she said the two cities represent a very large share of the people living in Chautauqua.
