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Note that the city of marseille ( actually the firemen of the city) in France have been doing monitoring of covid level since summer 2020 via sewers water.
This is actually pretty common. Two links offhand that have popped up on here recently:

Santa Clara County, CA: https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater

Boston, MA: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

HN thread for the Boston link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466172 Thread has links to other areas as well, and some helpful discussion of how this data can be interpreted, as well as some potential problems with it.

It's my impression that most major metropolitan areas (and many smaller water systems) do this on a regular basis for multiple diseases; I guess it was never really common knowledge before it started popping up on web dashboards with this pandemic. Maybe they just weren't too keen on publishing it before now or something?

"The pandemic has ushered in a new era of wastewater analysis, once a maligned discipline, to inform public health policy."

Really? Why was it once a "maligned discipline" ?