Orange County is already taking steps to be ready to identify the omicron variant if it makes its way to Central Florida.

The county will use the same strategy it relied heavily on to help pinpoint delta variant outbreaks: wastewater testing, which was key to helping pinpoint outbreaks of the delta variant even before cases of the virus were reported.

“The county administration has a lot of tools when it comes to COVID, this being one of them,” said Michael Hudkins, Orange County Utilities Manager with the Water Reclamation Division.

During the last week of July, at the peak of the delta variant outbreak, wastewater samples showed more than 5 million remnants of the virus were flushed into the system by residents.

Remnants are small, non-viable fragments of the virus that are shed in waste by both symptomatic and asymptomatic residents.

“Testing for COVID in the wastewater generally gives us about a week notice ahead of when we start seeing results of that in hospitals," Hudkins said.

Wastewater testing is also used to identify specific covid variants, and could be a huge help in slowing the spread of omicron as reported cases continue to rise globally.

“Our labs that we’re working with are currently developing the bioassays required to be able to detect the Omicron variant,” he said. “As soon as we have those available, we’ll begin testing for those immediately.”

According to sample data collected on Nov. 22, Orange County residents shed more than 650,000 remnants of the virus.

“We have seen a general downward trend in the amount of COVID in our wastewater over the last several weeks,” Hudkins said.

Hudkins said the county has placed testing and vaccination sites in areas where the wastewater testing showed there were coronavirus spikes.

OCU released the following information on its wastewater surveillance program:

Orange County is actively participating in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Health and Human Services (HHS) National Wastewater Surveillance System. The program monitors wastewater from water reclamation facilities across the United States for concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. The data collected by the program helps the CDC and local authorities better understand the spread of the virus in communities. The concentrations tested reflect both symptomatic and asymptomatic residents, alerting participating organizations to spikes in infections four-to-ten days before positive case numbers would reflect changes within the community.

Similar wastewater surveillance programs have been used internationally to:

• Determine if reintroduction of the virus has occurred, including spikes, trends, or outbreaks
• Define the effectiveness of local public health efforts
• And allow for increased preventative measures and allocation of resources to areas with high infection rates

Orange County’s water reclamation facilities serve approximately 870,000 people. It’s important to note that sampling results will fluctuate as infected individuals go in and out of the virus shedding cycle (about 21 days), which may be the cause of the decrease in the data.