Sewage-Handling Robots Help Predict COVID-19 Outbreaks in San Diego

UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers develop an automated process to test city sewage for SARS-CoV-2, allowing them to forecast the region’s COVID-19 caseload one to two weeks ahead of clinical diagnostic reports.

UC San Diego Bolsters Aggressive Return to Learn Plan to Prevent Outbreaks on Campus

UC San Diego’s nationally recognized, evidence-based Return to Learn program employs a comprehensive suite of education, monitoring, testing, intervention and notification tools that no other university is using. And the program continues to expand—including a recent introduction of weekly self-administered student testing kits, growth of the campus’s wastewater viral monitoring program and widespread use of the cellphone-based CA COVID Notify exposure notification system.

Testing Wastewater for COVID-19

UNLV researcher Edwin Oh and colleagues have implemented wastewater surveillance programs to screen samples for the presence of COVID-19 and to extract the RNA from the SARS-COV-2 virus to find targets that make vaccines more effective.