((PKG))  COVID WASTEWATER   
((Banner:  COVID Wastewater))  
((Reporter/Camera:  Shelley Schlender)) 
((Adapted by:  Philip Alexiou)) 
((Map:  Boulder, Colorado))    
((Main characters:  1 female;  1 male))   
((NATS)) 
((Popup Banner:   The University of Colorado is taking an 
innovative approach to monitoring COVID))  
((NATS)) 
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
Well, we call our project, Project Half Shell, because it's an 
homage to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hanging out in the 
sewers. 
((Jessice Darby, Engineering Student, University of 
Colorado)) 
Guy in the blue, his name’s Cresten Mansfeldt.  He's our 
professor.  He's done a lot of really cool stuff around the world 
with different water systems and epidemiology. 
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
So, that's an interior of a manhole.  It's one where it's servicing 
the dorms on campus.  So, what’s flowing through here is actually 
domestic wastewater, things we send down the drain through the 
toilets or through showers or laundry systems.  Basically, any 
drains that are coming out, end up flowing into these river 
networks that exist underneath most municipalities and cities.  
Here, we're most interested in what's coming out of the toilets 
and feces because that seems to be where individuals can 
shed the SARS-CoV-2 virus here. 
((Jessice Darby, Engineering Student, University of 
Colorado)) 
COVID is in your intestines and so, even if you don't have 
symptoms or before it actually is more of a disease or infection, it 
can be found in your intestines.  So, if you shed it into the 
sewer system, you can kind of determine if people have it, even if 
it's before they have symptoms or if they don't ever have 
symptoms.  
((NATS)) 
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
Yeah, so that’s actually, what you're seeing there is a peristaltic 
pump. 
((Jessice Darby, Engineering Student, University of 
Colorado)) 
What they're doing in the pump is they're helping to set up a way 
to collect the flow through 24 hours.  It flows into a jerrycan 
and then every day, the sample and collection team will get a few 
vials of it to send back to the lab to be able to test whether or not 
it has COVID in it.  There's a huge sampling team that, when you 
take it into the lab, they go through all the procedure to actually 
find if there's any of the COVID-19 virus in it. 
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
A single sample here is reflective of hundreds of 
people's contributions.  So, instead of having to individually collect 
saliva samples from 200 to 400 people, barcode all of the 
individual ones, we can take more of a combined and 
anonymous approach, so that we have a monitoring but not a 
diagnostic signal.   
((NATS)) 
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
If you want to just close that up, we are actually good to be 
done.  We've got a site operational.  
((NATS)) 
During testing, like we initially turned the system on in early 
September, end of August.  Pretty much simultaneously, we 
started to see a lot of spikes within the system.   
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
This led the administration to actually invoke some of the social 
distancing options that were available.  We're returning to a phase 
where the sewer system is showing that it's a non-detectable 
signal for SARS-CoV-2.   
((Cresten Mansfeldt, Engineering Professor, University of 
Colorado)) 
Wherever you have mass amount of people in a specific building, 
so, at nursing homes, at high schools, this potentially would 
provide a lower cost way to monitor a signal for viruses such 
as SARS-CoV-2 or other pathogens over time. 
((NATS))