Pathogens and Pandemics

Working closely with public health units, Mark Servos and his team pivoted their research during COVID-19 lockdown to help build a province-wide wastewater surveillance network.

Back in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the global scientific community thought they might be able to help. “Everyone wanted to find ways to support public health responses and serve their communities,” says Mark Servos, who is Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection and a professor at the University of Waterloo. “Things moved so quickly, people were working hard, and we had to find solutions – fast.

At the time, Servos was leading two projects as part of the Global Water Futures (GWF) program – one to model the impact of wastewater on fish in the Grand River, and another to understand what environmental DNA (also known as “eDNA”) can tell us about water quality.

But what does water quality have to do with COVID? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Mark Servos,  Professor, Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection

Applying science to the problem

Servos realized that his team, which explores issues related to predicting and managing the risk of human activities in aquatic ecosystems, could use science from the GWF projects to develop methods to track the spread of COVID-19.

“In the same way we track eDNA, we can track fragments of SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater samples,” he explains. “To track COVID’s spread in our communities, we applied similar tools to measure the viral RNA in the sewers. For us it wasn’t a huge change because the basic science is the same.”

The team quickly pivoted its current research to respond to the emergency. “We asked the public health units how we could help, we worked with our colleagues to develop the methods, and started reporting our results that first summer,” Servos explains.

Independently of Waterloo’s group, the eDNA team at the University Saskatchewan made a similar pivot, “Our GWF teams were able to work closely together to find solutions.”

Working together to stop the spread

Over the next three years, Servos, his colleagues, and their research supported public health agencies by developing a wastewater surveillance network for SARS-CoV-2. This work proved immensely valuable to Ontario’s pandemic response.

Looking back, Servos remarks that the emergency brought scientific experts and government together to share ideas and support each other. “At first, we were working directly with public health units in two regions. When the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) got wind of what we were doing, they wanted to help. They immediately started supporting our efforts and, in collaboration with other university labs, started building a provincial program.”  

In January 2021, the MECP funded a surveillance and reporting network, which included 14 labs in Ontario. “Virtually overnight, we went from sampling at few sites to having a network of 170 sites in Ontario,” Servos says. Along with other key labs, the UW team ran workshops to transfer the methods that had been developed. “We shared methods, exchanged ideas, and even exchanged samples and supplies with other labs to get them started quickly,” he says. “We also started a weekly virtual ‘coffee club’ to provide support to each other. It was a truly collaborative environment.”

Then the SARS-CoV-2 variants came. “When Omicron hit, we were already developing methods to measure the emerging variants,” Servos explains. “Those new methods picked up Omicron so were able to track it as it spread across Ontario. Omicron’s rapid spread overwhelmed the clinical testing capacity in Ontario and wastewater became one of the most reliable ways to track community infections.”

At this point in the pandemic, the public health units had no way to know how many people were sick. “They could only measure impact by counting the number of people who were hospitalized or had died. But we could see the trends in the wastewater and the numbers were skyrocketing,” says Servos. “Our lab results became the most effective way of monitor SARS-CoV-2 spread in our communities.”

Preparing for the future

In many ways, life after lockdowns has returned to normal. But Servos says wastewater monitoring programs showed that COVID infection rates remained high during the last year. “People are still getting sick, but they’re not getting as sick, and they’re no longer reporting infection,” he says. The wastewater signal is now declining (in summer 2023) but there are still many people being hospitalized with COVID-19.

“This pandemic is not done; nor is our work,” he says. As the program that Servos and his team developed in rapid response to the COVID-19 emergency winds down, it’s evolving into a long-term program to explore pathogens and develop tools for future pandemics. “We need to remember the lessons we learned,” he says. “We need to be prepared for the next big challenge.”

Collaboration and communication