What’s Flowing Beneath the World Cup: How Verily’s Wastewater Monitoring Could Catch the Next Outbreak

More than 6 million fans are descending on North America this summer for the World Cup, which kicked off last week. 

They’re arriving from dozens of countries and passing through 16 host cities — that kind of mass movement of people is a global party unlike anything the continent has ever seen, but it also could be a major public health challenge.

Precision health company Verily is responding by deploying wastewater monitoring across the host cities’ metro areas. It is testing for pathogens like COVID-19, flu, RSV, norovirus and measles, with the goal of spotting outbreaks five to seven days before they show up in a providers’ offices.

By analyzing wastewater data, Verily aims to help health officials make more proactive, geographically targeted decisions about where to deploy resources and public health guidance before a clinical surge is evident, rather than reacting after cases have already risen. Wastewater monitoring also provides visibility into populations who may not seek healthcare or remain entirely asymptomatic, which the company said is crucial given the millions of international travelers.

During the pandemic, wastewater monitoring was validated as a public health tool that can be deployed at scale. Since then, Verily has added capabilities to its monitoring platform to test for more than 30 pathogens, as well as built out its lab capacity and data infrastructure, the company said.

During the World Cup, Verily will collect samples from municipal wastewater facilities and send them to its lab three times per week from each host site. Results become available within 48 hours of the sample reaching the lab.

Verily feeds its results into a coalition called the Health Security Operations Center (HSOC), which combines wastewater data with electronic health records, environmental sensors and social media monitoring. This multimodal picture is then distilled into daily situation reports sent to more than 350 public health officials and emergency managers across North America.

“When a signal rises to the level of a significant risk, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, working with the HSOC, will issue formal public health notes through established channels. From there, the public health officials receiving the HSOC’s intelligence determine how to act on what they see. Bringing together experts across disciplines, and collecting data at sufficient scale and breadth, is how we maximize the likelihood that something real doesn’t get missed, and that it is elevated when significant,” Verily said in a statement sent to MedCity News.

The company is also displaying a public-facing dashboard on its website, which gives regular updates on pathogen trends across the host cities.

Photo: Lighthouse Films, Getty Images