The Rega Institute has revealed that Covid-19 was detected in the wastewater from the first plane that arrived in Zaventem from China on Saturday. However, due to a lack of faecal matter in the wastewater, determining the infection's variation will prove to be difficult.
On Monday, the Federal Public Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke announced that Belgium would start testing wastewater from flights coming from China, as a result of the rise in Covid-19 cases in the Asian country.
The idea is that testing passengers' excrements would allow Belgian authorities to gather more information on the possible spread of new Covid-19 variants from China.
As a result, the Rega Institute indicated that their wastewater tests from the first plane that landed in Zaventem from China on Saturday came back slightly positive for Covid-19, which indicates that some passengers were infected with the virus.
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All eyes are now turned to their testing of which variants these infections were, which could prove worrying "if anything other than Omicron" shows up, according to Elke Wollants, a laboratory manager at institute.
However, determining these variants will prove to be difficult due to a lack of faecal matter in the waste water. “We wanted a thicker substance, a real stool sample," lamented Wollants. "Here it was mainly water with some dirt in it, in which we thought we would find nothing,” she added.
