Prevention
Ever since the pandemic began, there have been different ways of trying to track and warn people about the spread of COVID-19. There are official COVID-19 case counts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with contact tracing and more. But wastewater surveillance has been a growing field—and now the CDC is in on it, too.
The CDC is now sharing data online from the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), which essentially tracks the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in your poop. Certain cities have had wastewater surveillance programs for a while now, but the CDC is attempting to aggregate all that information into one easy-to-view spot that the public can view.