Windsor-Essex County can offer advanced warnings of spikes in infectious diseases because of its geographic location. It sits on the busiest border crossing between the USA and Canada with over thousands of residents commuting daily, the seasonal arrival of high concentrations of agriculture migrant workers from Central, South America and the Caribbean, and a post-secondary student population at the University of Windsor and St. Clair College highly integrated with local communities.

An inter-disciplinary team of UWindsor researchers are collaborating on a project to tackle COVID19 from multiple fronts using wastewater surveillance, SARS-CoV-2 bioinformatical analysis, and non-invasive saliva-based rapid qPCR testing. 

They aim to 1) detect emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, 2) provide molecular and structural information to prioritize variants of concern, 3) provide community-based surveillance to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks.