As Milwaukee hosts 50,000 visitors for the Republican National Convention, a UW-Milwaukee lab will be measuring raw sewage every day to track changes in COVID-19 and other disease levels.
The research is part of an ongoing effort between the McLellan Lab at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences and the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene. These entities measure microbes in sewage to test for illness rates all across the state, but the Republican National Convention, or RNC, provides an opportunity to measure the impact of an influx of people on public health.
Dr. Sandra McLellan leads research in the Milwaukee area, and she says the RNC is a "natural extension" of the work they've been doing over the last four years.
"Over the last four years we've been monitoring wastewater for not just COVID, but different respiratory pathogens," she says. "The RNC [is] just an added activity for what we're already doing across the state."
McLellan says wastewater data is used in conjunction with other data, such as people self-reporting illness, and can help public health officials get an earlier warning of rising disease levels. In the case of COVID-19 this is helpful when the public is not testing like they were three or four years ago.
The public can also view the data for themselves on a dashboard on the Wisconsin Department of Health Services website.
