Summit County has had the highest per capita cases count of COVID-19 for much of the pandemic. As a result a lot of innovative testing and study has taken place in the community.
One way COVID-19 is being tracked in the community is through a University of Utah, BYU and Baylor University study of wastewater in the Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District. Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough says while they’re not directly involved in the study they are intrigued by it.
“Data and us monitoring and doing surveillance is really important,” Bullough explained. “We need to be able to identify surges in our community and we need to be able to identify those before individual start showing up in large numbers at the hospital. The way I’m visualizing this is kind of a multi-tiered data approach. I think utilizing the wastewater as a potential baseline, one point of information, looking at changes over time as that may help us identify spikes.”
Bullough says they’re also measuring other data points related to COVID-19 in the community. He says they’re doing ongoing sampling and ramping up random sampling and greatly increasing contact tracing.
“So, I view this really as kind of a quiver of tools and we’ll use all the information together,” Bullough said. “I think the wastewater information is super intriguing. I'm hoping that it's more than anything—pun intended here—passes the smell test and helps us know that the rest of our data seem to be right. So, I think it's an important part of the package.”
Summit County has also been hosting another study by the University of Utah they have been conducting antibody tests. That test can determine whether someone has been exposed to the virus previously. Bullough says they anticipate more information on the pilot program very soon.
“We are talking about really when the time might be to ramp up antibody testing for specific groups of individuals,” Bullough continued. “That's part of our overall strategy and we've been of course consulting with the state to really hone in on what makes sense. The antibody tests are available more widely now. They still have issues. There's generally high variability among them, with respect to results.”
Bullough adds that just like other decisions regarding the pandemic the county and it’s restriction levels will continue to be driven by data.
