CHEO researchers looking for better ways to detect COVID-19 variants in Ottawa’s waste water

Research scientists at CHEO are looking into better ways of detecting COVID-19 variants in Ottawa’s waste water.

This comes as public health officials in Quebec confirm that they have identified the provinces in Canada’s first case of the B.1.6.7 variant, which originated in India and is believed to be fuelling the pandemic surge in that country.

OPH officials said detecting and identifying COVID-19 in the waste water is the city’s most important indicator for recognizing a oncoming trend.

It's the reason that researchers can be so precise — because everyone contributes to the city’s waste water.

According to Tyson Graber, an associate research scientist at CHEO, detecting new variants is not yet a perfect science. B.1.1.7, for example, which now dominates the COVID-19 detection types in the city’s waste water at nearly 100 per cent, it only started appearing after there were over 100 active cases in the city.

“It’s a question of how strong that signal is in the waste water before we can confidently call it as one variant or another,” he said.

Still, Greber said they do a wide range water test once a week that determines whether there are other types of variants in the city.

As with the UK variant, for example, Greber pointed out that researchers were only able to start detecting the variant in the waste water when over 100 cases were established in the city.