COVID-19 wastewater surveillance continues in Windsor-Essex after province pulls plug: GLIER

Windsor-Essex will not be impacted by Ontario's decision to discontinue a program for sampling wastewater to monitor the level of COVID-19 in the population, according to the executive director of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER).

MikeMcKay said the institute applied for a federal grant announced early May part of the Canada biomedicalresearch fund for pandemic preparedness and received a $15 million grant over four years.

"In that proposal, we had actually included this strategic area, Windsor-Essex, as one of the places that we'd like to continue wastewater surveillance," McKay said on CBC Radio'sWindsor Morning.

"At the time we submitted the proposal, we didn't know if the Ontario network would be continuing past this spring, but still the news we heard late last week really blindsided us."

The province said scrapping testing at the provinciallevel will "avoid duplication" with a federal program.

"The federal government conducts wastewater surveillance across Canada and is moving to expand its sampling to additional sites in Ontario," said Environment Ministry spokesperson Gary Wheeler in an email to CBC News.

"Ontario is working to support this expansion while winding down the provincial wastewater surveillance initiative," he said.

McKay said the provincial wastewater surveillance initiative covered all 34 public health units in Ontario and was lauded as probably the most comprehensive surveillance network in North America, if not globally.

Labs have shown the data gathered is "actionable" and can result in early mitigation or or containment and address a potential threat, McKay said.

"We've seen that in the University of Windsor campus, for example, early in the pandemic where we used wastewater surveillance to notify public health to immediately test students in the residence hall and findasymptomatic cases," he said.

"So, we know it can be actionable. We also know it helps our public health units allocate resources to different things."

Officials said the provincial Ministry of Health will be able to analyze Ontario's wastewater data through a data-sharing agreement with the Public Health Agency of Canada, but McKay is concerned they will likely only cover three to five locations in Ontario.

"We know that Toronto is one of those locations. They haven't decided on the others yet We had almost 60 locations covered in the existing network, [so] a lot of the small regions will likely have no no surveillance," McKay said.

More than a surveillance network

According to McKay, the 13 academic labs that participated in the wastewater testing initiative were more than just a surveillance network.

He said even though the scientific field of wastewater surveillance was new during the COVID-19 pandemic, together they had developed the discipline, overcame the pitfalls and challenges together.

"We really advanced this field moving beyond COVID, applying it to influenza, to RSV and potentially to any other emerging threat," he said.

McKay said there was a lot of "sharing between public health units, [so] what would be happening in Windsor-Essex could be shared with what was happening in Chatham-Kent and vice versa."

Meanwhile, McKay said the wastewater testing initiative saw a lot of investment in infrastructure and also in training of personnel, which has prepared the province to tackle any emerging threats.

"What I worry about is we lose that investment and we lose those highly qualified personnel, the infrastructure, because when we have another threat in the future, will we be able to, you know, immediately start turning our attention to it?

"I think locally again, we have this funding that will allow us to continue this work for the next couple of years but other places, other public health units in the province will not have this resource available to them," he said.

Coverage for Thunder Bay

McKay said 17 partners were included in the application for funding, and not all are involved in wastewater surveillance.

He said it's a small fraction of the $15 million that will go toward wastewater surveillance, but it's enough to continue testing in Windsor-Essex and Leamington.

The City of Thunder Bay was also included in GLIER's funding application, McKay said.

He said there will be some coverage for Thunder Bay, but it will be reduced from the level it was under the provincial initiative.