Important information about the corona pandemic can be found in Bavaria’s sewage treatment plants. Because new virus variants can show up early in the wastewater, people are looking for them in more and more places. In Augsburg, for example.
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Johann Osel, Augsburg/Munich
It doesn’t smell that bad at measuring station number one anymore. This is a little house on the grounds of the Augsburg sewage treatment plant, with sewage and faeces flowing underneath. It looks like a rushing stream in nature through a hatch from above, just unappetizingly brown. The fact that the droppings don’t rise up so unmistakably in one’s nose is due to what the creek has already done. Everything that 380,000 people in the city and parts of the region spend in the toilets and sewage system runs into the inlet of the sewage treatment plant in the north of Augsburg.