Raw data

THE SEWER IS THE LAST STOP for Bozeman, Montana’s waste, but lately, it’s the first one for Blake Wiedenheft’s work. An associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Montana State University, Wiedenheft has joined other virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists as a member of the university’s COVID-19 task force.

Back in March, a colleague mentioned testing wastewater for evidence of COVID-19 in human waste. The next day, Wiedenheft drove down to Bozeman’s wastewater treatment plant to see if he could grab a sample. Given how few cases there were in the area at the time, and that 6 million gallons of water flow through the plant daily, he wasn’t sure if the virus would be detectable. But Wiedenheft immediately found evidence of it — and it kept appearing in the four samples he analyzed over the next 10