Cancelling Wastewater Testing for COVID was a mistake

Amy Buitenhuis | Jul 17, 2024

On August 1, communities in Frontenac and across the Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Health Unit will no longer have any information about the levels of COVID and other diseases in the community.

At the start of June, the Ford government decided to cancel the program testing wastewater for COVID levels and other diseases. 

The Ontario Wastewater Wastewater Surveillance Initiative began in 2020 to monitor levels of COVID across Ontario. It is an especially effective testing method as it doesn’t rely on anyone testing themselves for COVID. Instead, researchers can take samples from wastewater treatment plants and determine the level of COVID across the community. And it’s extremely cost effective - the COVID testing program in Ontario costs over $100 million dollars annually, while this program costs between $10 and $20 million per year. The program has now been expanded to track levels of influenza (A and B) and RSV.

This program is essential for our public health. Anyone can go online to check the levels of COVID in their community. This helps people make decisions about how safe it is for them to participate in communal activities. This is especially important for people who are immune-comprised or have Long COVID or other chronic illnesses. It’s also important for public health officials and hospitals to know the level of illness in the community so they can design programs to keep people safe.

Ontario’s program is particularly impressive - researchers and public health units joined forces to collect from 59 sources across urban, rural, and First Nations communities, covering all 34 public health units in the province. The federal government’s program has about the same number of testing sites to serve the entire country. The Ontario program was a world leader at the start of the pandemic, and researchers shared their lessons learned across the globe, including with researchers in Fiji, Uganda, Colombia and Venezuela. In 2023, Ontario researchers even held a workshop on a global waste water surveillance program at the World Congress for Public Health in Rome.

This makes it particularly frustrating that the Ford Government decided to cancel the program in June. The government claims that the program is not needed, because there is also a federal program led by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). But the PHAC program only currents reports on one city - Toronto. This means that Frontenac, and every other rural community and First Nation in the province will no longer have access to this information, leaving 11 million Ontarians in the dark about their health. PHAC has said it will start collecting at four other sources, but no locations have been announced yet, and that will not even come close to replacing the 59 testing sites currently operating in Ontario.

This short-sighted decision from the Ford Government puts all of us at risk. It means that people across the province, everywhere except Toronto, will not know the levels of COVID in their community. And it means we will have even less information about the next pandemic, and no testing infrastructure in place to try to stop it if it does happen. It is so disappointing to see how little the Ford Government seems to care about the health of rural communities. Residents in Frontenac deserve to have updated and accurate information about the health of our communities.

(Amy Buitenhuis lives in Toronto and is a frequent visitor to Frontenac to visit her parents, who have lived in Godfrey for over 10 years. She is a member of Informed Ontarians (instagram), a team of volunteers who started a petition to save wastewater testing in Ontario. In her day job, she helps cities prepare for climate change.)