Canadian Water Network is pleased to announce the establishment of the COVID-19 Wastewater Coalition’s Ontario Hub. This is the first of several regional hubs that are planned across Canada.

If your municipality, utility, research team or laboratory is interested in participating in this hub’s working group meetings to exchange knowledge and identify collaboration opportunities, contact Sandra Cooke, Director (Canadian Water Network) at [email protected].

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In the months that have followed since the Coalition was founded earlier this spring, interest in wastewater surveillance from Ontario wastewater utilities, public health authorities, universities and laboratories has increased exponentially. Efforts across the province are already underway in Toronto, York Region, Peel Region, Hamilton, Windsor, Kingston, London, Durham Region and other locations.

Many of these early adopters are members of the Canadian Municipal Water Consortium. Through their interactions with CWN during the pandemic, they’ve been receiving regular updates about the developing potential of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). As a result, these communities have been in a position to leverage emerging knowledge and partner with university research teams.

The Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) is one of the leading members of the Canadian Municipal Water Consortium. This provincial organization partners with more than 180 municipalities, First Nations, businesses, governments and institutions across Ontario to provide water and wastewater solutions. Their organizational commitment to supporting the research, development and demonstration of new and innovative water and wastewater practices meant that OCWA was uniquely positioned to catalyze the development of a regional hub. CWN thanks OCWA for their financial support of this important initiative.

“OCWA looks forward to collaborating with Canadian Water Network to help accelerate the development of a COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program. We are pleased to be financially supporting the Coalition to help share critical knowledge so that public health authorities can better understand and track COVID-19 in communities across Canada.” — Nevin McKeown, President and CEO, Ontario Clean Water Agency

The COVID-19 Wastewater Coalition’s Ontario Hub will:

• Accelerate WBE capacity across Ontario by supporting research groups and laboratories with the knowledge and connections they need to develop programs that are scientifically rigorous and useful to decision makers.
• Share evolving provincial, national and international knowledge so that Ontario’s communities can move forward in a coordinated way using the best science available.
• Evaluate options to scale up to a province-wide program in 2021.

By coordinating efforts across the province, Ontario communities will be empowered to implement the best available options for wastewater surveillance programs. The science is still very new and poor or misleading information could potentially be dangerous. Effective WBE programs will need to be tailored to site-specific and wastewater-specific conditions in a way that provides useful information and advances public health understanding of community spread. For more information on how the Coalition is comparing the performance of different specialized methodologies and validating analytical rigour, see the Coalition’s national Inter-Lab Study. The findings from this study will be critical in informing community programs.