New Castle County last month unveiled a new online coronavirus sewer monitoring dashboard.
The county entered into a partnership with data company CompassRed to provide a detailed solution for county residents to monitor Covid-19 particles in New Castle County sewers.
The dashboard, updated weekly with the most recent data BioBot provides, offers a number of tools to visualize data, such as color-coded maps which highlight the Estimated Prevalence Rate (EPR) and estimated cases.
New Castle County was one of the early adopters of the BioBot technology, which has detected a higher rate of coronavirus than testing programs.
The technology has been used by the county in selecting sites for coronavirus testing.
The website can be viewed at biobot.nccde.org
“We are thankful for the work CompassRed is doing to help our citizens visualize the information provided by the New Castle County environmental engineering team and BioBot,” County Executive Matt Meyer said. “CompassRed has accomplished a challenging task, taking multiple data sets and visualizing them for both public and healthcare consumption, with a focus on mapping and trend spotting communication to the public at large.”
“We’re a strong believer that data can provide insight, and in this case, can save lives,” CompassRed Co-Founder Patrick Callahan said. “This is a great opportunity to work with New Castle County on an innovative program related to Covid-19 and we hope that our partnership has the potential to affect the curve.”
This April, New Castle County entered into a partnership with Cambridge, MA-based BioBot.
BioBot is testing New Castle County’s busiest wastewater treatment plants for evidence of the COVID-19 virus. The county has since expanded testing to 12 pump stations and wastewater treatment plant locations.
A similar approach that samples sewage has been used in other nations during efforts to eradicate polio.
BioBot currently tests over 400 wastewater plants in 42 states and has previously been recognized for the novel use of wastewater testing methods to track opioid abuse.
CompassRed is a data and artificial intelligence company headquartered in Wilmington.
BioBot is the first company to commercialize data collected from wastewater and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
