How covid-19 spurred governments to snoop on sewage

Nuhu amin is a medical researcher at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh. Later this month one of his colleagues will dig into a pit latrine in Cox’s Bazar, a refugee settlement in Bangladesh where 900,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims live. A sample will be extracted, refrigerated, and sent on a 12-hour bus journey to a laboratory in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. Once there, it will be tested for the presence of many different bugs, including cholera, typhoid and sars–cov-2, the virus responsible for covid-19. With aid from the Rockefeller Foundation, a big philanthropic organisation, Dr Amin plans for his team to repeat the process every week. That, he hopes, will give him insight into how covid-19 is spreading through the camp.