[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Research carried out by biotech startup Biobot Analytics found more traces of the pathogen than expected in the waste water, considering the number of confirmed cases in the area.
The findings suggested there could be as many as 2,300 people infected with the virus in the region. At the time the study was taken in mid to late March, there were 446 confirmed cases in the area, according to the researchers.
A team of scientists from startup Biobot Analytics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT,) Harvard University, and Brigham and Women's Hospital tested water at an urban treatment facility over the course of seven days from March 18-
They found higher quantities of the virus than predicted. Eric Alm, one of the authors of the study, told Newsweek: 'At Biobot, we have been using wastewater based epidemiology to generate data on the opioid crisis in the US...
'Even if those viral particles are no longer active or capable of infecting humans, they may still carry genetic material that can be detected using an approach called PCR (polymerase chain reaction,) which amplifies the genetic signal many orders of magnitude creating billions of copies of the genome for each starting virus.'
The state of Massachusetts has 18,941 confirmed cases of the highly contagious disease, as of Thursday.
The death toll stands at 503, the state Department of Public Health announced. |