Experts are looking at how reopening might ignite a pandemic – not through the volume of hospitalized patients or positive cases, but through testing human feces at county sewage plants.

Since late March, Miami-Dade’s Water and Sewer Department has been sampling the flow of untreated waste and sending it to a specialty lab in Boston as a possible way to estimate infection rates and early indicators of another wave. In cities like Paris, this kind of research has already been able to trace the outbreak through COVID-19 concentrations in sewage and has shown upticks that will appear in wastewater before hospitals.

“There are serious concerns about a potential second wave of this pandemic, so this analysis will be very useful as an early warning indication of where outbreaks might occur,” said Douglas Yoder, deputy director of Miami-Dade’s Water and Sewer Department.

This sewage testing has also suggested negative implications of using public restrooms during coronavirus and environmental concerns as it relates to sewage spills and overflows  and the potential risk of COVID-19 transmission.