Today I met with Ariel Christensen, a PhD student who has been working on North Carolina’s COVID-19 wastewater surveillance system. The system monitors water from sewage systems across the state and measures the COVID-19 viral gene copies to determine the prevalence of the virus in certain areas. This tool has become increasingly more helpful in recent times with the increase in at-home test availability and decrease in willingness to test at all. With less testing occurring, a decline in the case count has been observed, shown in the first graph above, but according to the viral load in the wastewater in the same region of Cary, the second graph, COVID-19 is still very much present. Because of this large disparity, wastewater has become a useful tool in more accurately measuring virus prevalence.