On a sunny afternoon in late August, Sebastien Wurtzer pulled on a hazmat suit and complained about being overwhelmed by shit. “We are drowning in it,” he said, and waved at a table laden with samples of water, ranging from crystal clear to murky brown. On the plastic bottles, the names of popular beach towns, some of which have been on the news amid a spike in coronavirus cases.
Wurtzer is a lead virologist at Eau de Paris’s research lab, a facility nestled in the capital’s southern industrial armpit, right next to a nightclub known for occasional shoot-outs. Wurtzer has been quietly tracking viruses in surface water for the past decade before events took a sharp turn earlier this year. In February, with the possibility of a pandemic looming, Wurtzer read a Chinese study claiming to have found traces of the virus in patients’ stools. That’s when it hit him: what if he could test the stool of every Parisian and check for the virus? Enter the capital’s wastewater.
Weekly samples from the city’s treatment plants mirrored the rise and fall of COVID-19 cases. Wurtzer and his boss, Laurent Moulin, quickly realized that they had a new way to cheaply monitor the health of large populations.
