Population Health Research Brief Series

Testing a community’s wastewater for pathogens lets public health agencies track infectious disease without requiring anyone to get tested, but this tool may not serve every community equally well.

This brief describes how New York State’s wastewater surveillance system performs across communities with different levels of social vulnerability. The authors find that while the system covers about 80% of the state’s population, communities with higher shares of Black, Latino, and Asian residents are connected to larger treatment plants, so outbreaks there must grow 3 to 4 times larger before wastewater testing detects them.

Hospitalization forecasts were also far less accurate in small, rural counties (under 20% accuracy) than in large urban counties (over 60% accuracy).