A pioneering COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program that helped make San Diego a national leader in early virus detection has paused operations.
The San Diego Epidemiology and Research for COVID Health (SEARCH) program — a collaboration between UC San Diego, Scripps Research, and Rady Children’s Hospital — officially stopped collecting and analyzing wastewater samples last week after county funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ended.
The abrupt pause has left San Diego scientists worried about future public health blind spots.
“We learned that we could predict surges,” said Dr. Louise Laurent, director of the EXCITE lab at UC San Diego. “We could detect variants as they reached our local population, in many cases even faster than we could by doing individual testing of infected persons.”
What distinguished the program nationwide is it didn’t just detect COVID-19 pathogens, it sequenced the wastewater, said Scripps Research scientist Josh Levy.
“To figure out all of the different variants and subvariants and lineages that are emerging,” Levy said. “We've developed the associated scientific tools in order to be able to extract that information in real time.”
The pause means no new samples, no sequencing and no localized insights into how COVID-19 is evolving, he said.
Gutting public health protections now is dangerous, especially with rising cases of measles and bird flu, said Dr. Robert Schooley, a UC San Diego infectious disease specialist.
“Infectious diseases are here to stay,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to take away our ability to combat them.”
Schooley said wastewater monitoring helped him guide immunocompromised patients on when to take extra precautions.
The County of San Diego had been contributing about $600,000 annually in federal HHS funds to keep the program running. County officials said they will continue monitoring respiratory viruses through other methods and have plans to launch in-house wastewater testing later this year with federal funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
