A pilot project in Israel is looking for traces of the coronavirus in municipal sewage systems with the aim of identifying and isolating areas infected with coronavirus, science and technology website Israel21c reported.
According to the report, wastewater management company Kando is employing surveillance solutions to pinpoint outbreak hotspots, which could help curb the spread of the virus.
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Kando's VP of Product and Marketing Yaniv Shoshan said that prior to the global pandemic the Tzur Yigal-based company, founded nine years ago, was "involved in detecting and mapping wastewater quality and pollution in cities in the United States, Europe, and Israel with the goal of improving water quality and reducing environmental damage."
The company can use the same technology to see if there is any trace of COVID-19 in wastewater, he told Israel21c.
Kando teamed up with Technion and Ben-Gurion University researchers and adapted its methodology to incorporate virus-testing lab techniques in checking sewage gathered by its automatic samplers.
Water samples are transported to a lab for testing according to a special model and the result shows the size of the population affected upstream of the measurement unit, Shoshan explained.
A pilot spanning several weeks that took place in the southern city of Ashkelon was a proof-of-concept and will help Kando realistically calibrate the parameters of the model that were set theoretically. Results are to be published next week, the report said.
Shoshan says the company has received inquiries about the virus sampling system "from every continent."
"We have partners and equipment ready in all the places where we have customers. We are a full solution company – our systems are installed and maintained so the customer does nothing but get the data," he told Israel21c.
"We don't have a lab inhouse, so we added a lab service to our team in the last few months."
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