Almost anywhere with a sewer connection can help the Center For Disease Control's (CDC) system for tracking COVID-19 in wastewater.  

The CDC’s Network Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) includes labs to track COVID cases.

"As you can see here, there's all these tubes, and they just have 200 microliters of this clear liquid that has all the RNA and DNA from the wastewater sample," said Joaquin Bradley Silva, lab manager at UC Berkeley.

From the samples, scientists can tell how much of the coronavirus is in an area. The CDC’s NWSS project lead says they can identify it down to the zip code.

Now, they’re starting to share that information with the public on their online COVID tracker. More than 500 sites will begin submitting data in the coming weeks.

Alexandria Boehm, a professor of civil engineering at Stanford University, leads a team of researchers testing samples from wastewater processing plants across northern California.

She says the program will help move the U.S. from a pandemic to an endemic state.  

"It's really exciting that the public can see all the hard work we've been doing and maybe become more educated about how wastewater can provide a glimpse into the public health of their communities," Dr. Boehm said. 

Monitoring wastewater provides information on a population in a single sample. It also is less biased than individual case data, which may under-represent asymptomatic infections and cases in communities with lower testing rates. 

Some critics have voiced concern about the nuance of interpreting the data.  

The CDC’s project lead says their tracker’s main metric will be looking at the percentage change of concentration over a 15-day period. People can also see how many samples tested positive at a site over that same 15 days, but it won’t compare site to site. For example, users won't be able to look at California next to Washington D.C.

This is just the start for what CDC plans to use wastewater surveillance for. By the end of this year, they plan to track other health threats like influenza and E. coli.

This story was originally reported on Newsy.com.

CINCINNATI — A popular question asked of many medical experts right now is “When can we say the pandemic is over?” The answer isn’t what most people would expect.

“This will never be over,” said Dr. Steve Feagins, medical director for Hamilton County Public Health. “We will move from pandemic to endemic.”

That’s not as bad as it might sound. The answer is rooted in defining the difference between those two terms.

Feagins said a pandemic is an epidemic on multiple continents in which case spread is deadly and uncontained.

Endemic means something is always going to be around — like the flu — but the case numbers are manageable and do not rise above a certain level.

“For example, during the peak of the flu season, there are in this nation somewhere between 50 and 150 flu deaths a day for an average of 100,” Feagins said. “Today, there are an average of 600 COVID deaths per day. So, what is it we feel comfortable with? 300? 200? 600?”

He said it’s a case rate over death rate that determines when we will have moved from pandemic to endemic, not a number of people or percentage of people vaccinated.

“I was on a Zoom with Dr. Fauci and others where that very question was coming up, and it comes down to what we’re willing to endure,” Feagins said. “Universal mitigation is more difficult than the number of deaths. We don’t have a flu year-round — we just have those deaths during flu season. We’ll have the same with COVID.”