5-DAY ADVANCE WARNING POSSIBLE
SUNY Oneonta Experiments
With Waste-Water Testing
By JIM KEVLIN • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com
ONEONTA – SUNY Oneonta is looking to get as far ahead of the coronavirus as it can – through waste-water testing.
It is what it sounds like.
“Even asymptomatic people start shedding coronavirus through their feces in the first day of their infection,” said Lachlan Squair, SUNY Oneonta’s chief of facilities & safety.
“The reason we’re doing the waste-water test,” he continued, “is we’re able to see an increase in the virus five days before it can be detected in testing of symptoms.”
The idea of testing waste-water – in a word, sewage – has been surfacing in news reports only in the past few days – “the canary in the coal mine,” a Clemson University administrator called it – so SUNY Oneonta is on the cutting edge.
