The expiration of the public health emergency in May also ended national test-sharing mandates that helped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. As tests became more expensive and harder to come by, the CDC turned to wastewater testing — or collecting samples of pathogens in our poo — to monitor the national and regional spread of COVID-19.
As Anne Zink, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and Alaska’s chief medical officer, told the New Yorker: Alaska is relying on wastewater testing because it “doesn’t have the money or political backing to set up daily nasal-swab testing sites.”
