Dear friends,
We have achieved Friday. The end of this presidency is still too many weeks away. There continues to be very little action to addressing the pandemic at the federal level. Yesterday in NYC, the mayor reported the highest seven-day average positivity rate in six months: 5.2%. There are almost 2,000 new cases in NYC each day.
So we will end another shitty week of 2020 by talking about wastewater epidemiology. About ten months ago, in what seems like another lifetime, I took twelve 4th- and 5th-graders (the ones in the yellow hardhats) on a tour of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility. We were doing research for a book project about sewers that was disrupted — but not derailed — by the pandemic.
For a lot of my students, that was the day that shit got serious. They began to understand the infrastructure that makes our city possible and they stopped thinking that researching sewers was anything but important.
I bring this up today because although NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection is testing wastewater for the coronavirus twice weekly at Newtown Creek and its other 13 wastewater treatment plants, it could be doing much more. Last week, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC selected a company to run a national study which could begin this month. This is an important step toward broader implementation of wastewater epidemiology in the US.
The initiative aims to include up to 100 treatment plants in the first phase.
Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State, encouraged New York to join the national study — and to increase the frequency and locations of its sewage testing scheme.
To him, wastewater monitoring is critical to keeping the virus in check….
But when, or if, the city may do more wastewater testing is up in the air, he said, partly because of the administration’s confidence in individual laboratory tests.
The combination of wastewater-testing and clinical testing will provide a cost-effective tool that will more quickly identify clusters of infections and will help determine if vaccines are effective.
Please contact DEP Commissioner Vincent Sapienza and Mayor De Blasio to urge them to invest in more testing capacity for wastewater epidemiology.
comes on the heels of a federal lawsuit that also alleges students with disabilities have been denied services during the pandemic.
The report lays part of the blame on the city’s reopening plan, which required schools to cover three different groups of students simultaneously: students who returned to school in-person several days a week, the same group of students on their days learning remotely, and fully remote students.
Staffing issues are apparently the root of the problem, and it’s possible that the potential end to the hybrid model would improve the situation. The results of the survey are plagued by a problem that is also undermining efforts to deliver needed services — the fact that many families lack reliable access to the internet.
If you are a public school parent and/or teacher and wish to assist with the investigation of special education in NYC schools, please complete this form.
Have a good weekend.
with love,
L