Warning: This article will be an unsettling combination of wholesome and highly disgusting.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, people have been urged to adopt good hygiene practices to avoid spreading and contracting the disease.
But winning the battle against the coronavirus sometimes means getting your hands dirty, literally.
NEA Staff Retrieve Wastewater (i.e. Shit) to Test for the Coronavirus
Determining how serious an outbreak is in a community typically involves large-scale testing, but there are other methods as well.
In a post on Facebook, news outlet CNA shared a video of workers from the Enviromental Health Institute (EHI) of the National Environmental Agency (NEA) testing wastewater for the coronavirus.
To be clear, wastewater is what you call sewage when you don’t want to gross out that news reporter who’s interviewing you.
In the video, one of the workers says that they test wastewater for the virus to get an idea of how severe the Covid-19 situation is in a community.
Here, they were monitoring the wastewater to assess the severity of the outbreak in migrant worker dormitories, where most of the country’s cases have come from.
In case you don’t know, if you have the coronavirus, your poop will have it too, as people shed the virus in their stool, even if they’re asymptomatic.
Not only that, the wastewater also contains respiratory discharge such as sputum because-
Reader: You don’t really have to explain it
Ok, fine. You know why.
According to the worker, the EHI team detected “virus signals” at the same time that infections in worker dormitories were first reported.
So, this method is pretty accurate. Disgusting, but accurate.
The Process
The first step in the process is identifying suitable manholes for sampling.
Editor: Can you please rephrase that sente-
These manholes should be located at an accessible site that’s away from the public and not on the main road.
Once identified, the EHI team will lower tubes into the manhole to draw samples for collection.
Once the samples are collected, the manhole cover will be replaced so unsuspecting residents don’t fall in, and the tubing will be connected to an autosampler.
An autosampler is a device that collects samples periodically from a large sample source.
Then, the team has to transfer the samples to sampling bottles to bring to the laboratory for testing.
This involves a lot of pouring and, presumably, a lot more breathing with your mouth.
Then, it’s time for testing.
At the lab, the samples are processed using a “virus concentration method” after which a “sensitive molecular assay” is used to detect the virus.
In English, this basically means that they’re testing these samples to determine the concentration levels of the virus.
According to the worker who was interviewed, sampling wastewater at dormitories will help in infection control and prevention at these dormitories.
Netizens’ Reaction
Netizens praised the NEA workers for digging through our sewage to help the nation.
Yesterday, 297 out of the 310 new Covid-19 cases were from migrant worker dormitories, a trend we have observed for the last few months.
Hopefully, with the good work that these people are doing, those numbers will soon drop.
Many of us can’t imagine doing something like this, but we need all the help we can get to defeat the coronavirus.
Sure, it’s a shit job, but someone has to do it.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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