Wastewater treatment plant operators report high capacity to support wastewater surveillance for COVID-19 across New York State, USA.

Wastewater surveillance for infectious disease expanded greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a collaboration between sanitation engineers and scientists, the most cost-effective deployment of wastewater surveillance routinely tests wastewater samples from wastewater treatment plants. To evaluate the capacity of treatment plants of different sizes and characteristics to participate in surveillance efforts, we developed and distributed a survey to New York State municipal treatment plant supervisors in the summer and fall of 2021. The goal of the survey was to assess the knowledge, capacity, and attitudes toward wastewater surveillance as a public health tool. Our objectives were to: (1) determine what treatment plant operators know about wastewater surveillance for public health; (2) assess how plant operators feel about the affordability and benefits of wastewater surveillance; and (3) determine how frequently plant personnel can take and ship samples using existing resources. Results show that 62% of respondents report capacity to take grab samples twice weekly. Knowledge about wastewater surveillance was mixed with most supervisors knowing that COVID-19 can be tracked via wastewater but having less knowledge about surveillance for other public health issues such as opioids. We found that attitudes toward wastewater testing for public health were directly associated with differences in self-reported capacity of the plant to take samples. Further, findings suggest a diverse capacity for sampling across sewer systems with larger treatment plants reporting greater capacity for more frequent sampling. Findings provide guidance for outreach activities as well as important insight into treatment plant sampling capacity as it is connected to internal factors such as size and resource availability. These may help public health departments understand the limitations and ability of wastewater surveillance for public health benefit.

Air quality changes in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December 2019, a new, severe coronavirus (COVID-19) appeared in Wuhan, China. Shortly after, the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in the United States. The emergence of this virus led many United States governors to enact executive orders in an effort to limit the person-to-person spread of the virus. One state that utilized such measures was New York, which contains New York City (NYC), the most populous city in the United States. Many reports have shown that due to the government-backed shutdowns, the air quality in major global cities improved. However, there has been only limited work on whether this same trend is seen throughout the United States, specifically within the densely populated NYC area. Thus, the focus of this study was to examine whether changes in air quality were observed in NYC resulting from New York State's COVID-19-associated shutdown measures. To do this, daily concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) were obtained from 15 central monitoring stations throughout the five NYC boroughs for the first 17 weeks (January through May) of 2015-2020. Decreases in PM2.5 (36%) and NO2 (51%) concentrations were observed shortly after the shutdown took place; however, using a linear time lag model, when changes in these pollutant concentrations were compared to those measured during the same span of time in 2015-2019, no significant difference between the years was found. Therefore, we highlight the importance of considering temporal variability and long-term trends of pollutant concentrations when analyzing for short-term differences in air pollutant concentrations related to the COVID-19 shutdowns.