Could sewage testing in Detroit serve as a COVID-19 early-warning system?

It sounds like a crappy job, but it just might help save lives.

If you have the coronavirus, it is passing right through you, researchers confirm, and, with every flush, it’s going into the sewer. As a result, Detroit public officials now hope by collecting sewage samples, they can track and predict outbreaks.

Officials announced Monday they are refocusing a two-year-old study with Michigan State University that originally was set up to look at whether disease-causing viruses could be detected in the city’s sewer system. 

“We are excited by the efforts of MSU and the implications this work may have in supporting our response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Denise Fair, Detroit’s top public health officer. “I am encouraged and applaud any effort that seeks to enhance the health and well-being of our community.”

Exciting and sewage are not two words that usually go together in the same sentence, but for public officials who have been trying for two months now to stop the spread of the deadly virus, any development is welcome.

So far, studies around the world have shown some promise in testing untreated sewage to create a kind of early warning system for outbreaks, and the research has concerns that the number of coronavirus cases may be undercounted.

It is still too early in Detroit to know how the city will track the virus, and how long it will take to turn the academic work into an actual process, Detroit Water and Sewerage Department spokesman Bryan Peckinpaugh said.

There’s also some talk, he added, of using robots to take the samples to help limit the contact humans must have with coronavirus.

But the trend — testing sewage as a cost-effective way to detect infections — appears to have shown some success, and has even given rise to a company, Biobot Analytics, that specializes in such research, noting on its website that “everybody pees and poops, every day.”

Biobot Analytics — which bills itself as the “first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage” — believes that mapping what sewage samples indicate empowers communities “to tackle public health proactively.”

In France, scientists found a “rise and fall” in coronavirus concentrations that matched COVID-19 outbreaks in Paris and nearby areas where a lockdown appeared to suppress the spread of the disease, accordin