picture credits: thewire.in
picture credits: frontiersin.org
The researchers of IIT Gandhinagar and Jawarharlal Nehru University’s School of Environment science have discovered an alarming find in which they have found traces of novel coronavirus in water samples taken from the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad.
The COVID-19 virus was found in the samples taken from the city’s two lakes as well Kankria and Chandola.
Professor Manish Kumar, of Earth Sciences Department in IIT, Gandhinagar, said that the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 in the lakes and rivers could lead to a dangerous state of affairs. The team had collected the water samples, once every week, from September 3 to December 29, 2019. And over 694 samples had been collected from Chandola lake and 402 samples were taken from Kankria lake.
According to the research, the researchers said that the virus could ‘live in natural waters for a long period of time.’ The development came days after the bodies of the COVID-19 infected patients were found floating in the rivers of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Karnataka became the first state in the whole country to introduce a city sewage surveillance system in Bengaluru to identify the potential COVID-19 cluster in the water of the city.
A similar research had been conducted in the year 2020 in Gujarat. The researchers from IIT Gandhinagar, GBRC and GPCB, conducted a research by carrying out the samples from Old Pirana Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) on May 8 and May 27, 2020 in Ahmedabad.
The WWTP receives over 106 million litres per day of the liquid waste from the Civil Hospital treating the COVID-19 patients. The viral RNA’s were isolated from the sewage samples and on the RT-PCR analysis of the viral RNA, which was done for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the result showed positive.
The WWTP samples from May 8 and May 27, both showed positive results for SARS-CoV-2 genes.
The researchers now want similar test to be conducted across the whole country to know whether or not the virus has been found in the water bodies elsewhere. If the tests are conducted and results come positive for the virus presence in the water bodies then it might be an alarming news for the people of the whole country.