Wastewater COVID-19 tracking could come to Sackville in 2024
Sackville may soon join the list of 62 communities in Canada who are having their wastewater tested regularly to spot trends in COVID-19. At Tantramar council committee of the whole on Monday, town engineer Jon Eppell told council about a recent offer from NB Public Health to participate in the growing surveillance program.
“This is a COVID-19 initiative that several communities across New Brunswick have been invited to participate in,” said Eppell. “We think this is a really good thing, and that after a couple of months of data collection, Sackville would appear as one of the communities on the national COVID-19 dashboard.”
Wastewater testing involves taking samples of sewage and testing for viral loads of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19. Sewage surveillance has been used as an early warning system for infection levels, because COVID-19 can be detected in wastewater even before symptoms develop in people.
The city of Moncton has participated in a testing program with Dalhousie University through much of the pandemic, and has been reporting to the national dashboard since the summer of 2022. Starting at various points in 2023, results from Bathurst, Campbellton, Fredericton, Miramichi, Saint John and Edmundston are also featured on the dashboard.
Department of Health spokesperson Sean Hatchard did not answer a question about how many new sites in New Brunswick would be added along with Sackville. Hatchard says the province has received federal funding to help develop its wastewater surveillance program, and is “hopeful that Tantramar will join the program in the new year.”… Continue
At the beginning of a “tidal wave” of Omicron, Public Health asks people to reduce contacts without additional restrictions
The news was dire in a technical briefing yesterday from New Brusnwick’s department of health.
Mathieu Chalifoux, lead COVID-19 epidemiologist with Public Health, presented projections for case counts and hospitalizations into the next two months, showing a steep curve peaking at the end of January or beginning of February.
Chalifoux said over 5000 New Brunswickers can be expected to develop the disease daily by the end of the month. ”Over a five day period, this would be about 25,000 individuals, assuming 2.3 individuals per household. This could mean over 7% or approximately 55,000 people isolating at any given moment,” the epidemiologist warned.
Unlike the last projections presented by the province, these account for the increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant which is now dominant in the province, but there have been some changes since the projections were created. In early January, the province started to limit eligibility for testing. Those limits could mean official PCR numbers come in lower than the stated projections, unless results from rapid tests are included.
The province has started to report the results from rapid tests that are being voluntarily submitted by those who test positive with the take-home test kits. On Tuesday, there were 191 new positive PCR cases announced, along with 842 new positive rapid test results.
Chalifoux acknowledged that case counts based on PCR testing are underreported, but increasingly the more important metric is the number of people that will need to be admitted to hospital with COVID-19.… Continue