These are the folks who set off the whole 'testing wastewater for covid' thing. They're not falsely claiming to be first on the scene. You're being misled by the context, because someone posted an old article.
If I still could I would change the title to correctly reflect it's age.
Already in 2009 it was known that coronaviruses can survive and remain infectuous in sewage water for up to two weeks.
Early covid wastewater research mostly focuses on waste water and stool as a possible infection vector, and in March 3rd the WHO suggested that COVID patients use their own toilet, to avoid spread through aerosolization during flushing, and to increase chlorination efforts of sewage systems.
From the first outbreak of SARS-CoV, it was found that apartment plumbing can be an infection vector, and due to this, in Hong Kong, people suggest closing the toilet lid before flushing.
I was taught to always close the lid if you weren't actively using the toilet.
It always weirds me out a bit that the majority of people leave the lid up. What's the point of having a lid if you're not going to use it?
The difference here is in: close the lid before flushing
Touching the toilet is considered bad.
That's the reason please don't.
I guess people consider the lid aesthetic.
Wastewater surveillance is an important part of the global polio eradication project.
Technically, what you are describing is possible. It's actually not difficult, and many communities have been doing it [1].
The article title is misleading, however. Now that we know the genome of the nCoV, we know its gene products, and we can design targeted tests for it, it is a straightforward. However, this is not an early warning sign for eventual other nCoVs that may occur. This will only work for this one, and other discovered ones. This is not going to help us identify a new, unknown coronavirus outbreak.
As far as discovery goes, it's a much more involved and delicate process, and not one I'd trust to the low margin, low wage, low talent industry that unfortunately is sewage testing.
https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/coronavirus/wastewater...
To paraphrase, they didn't find anything the first two weeks, but samples from the 2nd, 9th and 16th of March showed signs of the virus, four days after the first person in the Netherlands tested positive for the virus.
They mention that they have applied this technique for the norovirus, measles and others before.
1. https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/nieuwe-coronavirus-aangetroffen-i...
That aside I wonder if there's already an infrastructure in place for mass testing of wastewater for all sorts of things. If it's useful for covid it might be useful for other diseases or health problems.
Then I start to wonder about the privacy implications of mass sewage collection. If it was localized I can imagine an authoritarian state using it to enforce anti-drug or anti-beef policies.