A man collects sewage samples from the dorms at Utah State University Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020, in Logan, Utah. Ontario is ending its COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program on July 31.Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones is defending the cancellation of the province’s COVID-19 waste water-monitoring program, arguing it duplicates the federal system, which is much smaller.
Health experts have sharply criticized the decision to kill Ontario’s program, which conducts weekly tests of waste water for signs of COVID-19 at 58 locations across the province. They say the provincial program was a vital early-warning system to predict waves of COVID-19 transmission and monitor for new variants of the virus. They also argue that the federal system is not comparable.
The shutdown is taking effect this week, just as a summer spike in cases emerges in Ontario and several other jurisdictions around the world.
Ontario’s wastewater-testing system, which was set up in 2020 and costs about $10-million to $15-million a year, had already been scaled back. But it still covered wide areas of the province, unlike the one currently run by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which collects samples from the sewage system in just four locations, all of which are in Toronto.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday at an unrelated news conference at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Ms. Jones said the federal government would carry on with its testing program and add four more sites as recommended by Ontario’s Environment Ministry. She could not say where the sites would be located, or how often sampling would take place, and argued Ontario’s system was meant to be temporary during the pandemic.
“I want to be clear: The duplicative piece has been removed,” Ms. Jones said. “The federal government will continue to test waste water in the province of Ontario and we have a commitment that they will expand.”
But a spokesperson for PHAC, Anna Maddison, provided a statement that contradicts Ms. Jones.
“Federal waste water monitoring programs do not duplicate the work done by Ontario’s waste water program,” the e-mailed statement reads. “While work is under way to expand federal testing in Ontario, the scope of the expansion would not replace the current scope of the Ontario program.”
The statement also says Ontario’s decision to shut its program was not co-ordinated with PHAC’s plan to add four cities to its waste water surveillance network in Ontario. And the new locations, the statement says, would be chosen “based on public-health analysis by experts in the field.”
Wastewater testing can also be used to track waves of influenza and other diseases, such as avian flu, about which public-health experts have recently expressed concern.
Marit Stiles, Leader of Ontario’s Opposition NDP, called on the province to reverse course on the shutdown and instead expand the waste water program. In a statement on Wednesday, she questioned whether the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford had learned anything from the pandemic.
“Reliable waste water testing is one of the tools we have at our disposal to monitor and prepare for future public-health emergencies – why would we take that away? Has Ford learned nothing from the past few years?” Ms. Stiles said.
The last update from Ontario’s wastewater-monitoring system is set to be released on Thursday, according to Public Health Ontario’s website.
The most recent results on the site, from July 25, show COVID-19 prevalence in the province’s waste water hitting levels not seen since January, driven by a large spike in Eastern Ontario. The disease is still blamed for 26 deaths a week across Canada. Higher COVID-19 transmission is also being reported in several U.S. states and parts of Europe.