Small towns and rural communities are likely to see the biggest impact when the province stops paying scientists to monitor wastewater for COVID-19 and other illnesses, an expert says.

Also likely to suffer is the scientific community’s ability to learn from rich, robust data that is currently being collected but won’t be after the provincial surveillance program wraps up at the end of July, said Chris deGroot, the lead researcher at the Western University lab that monitors the wastewater in this region.

“It’s safe to assume that with the transition to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), there will be a reduction in the total number of sites and that we’re most likely going to see the sites be in larger urban centres,” deGroot said.

The province told his lab and others across Ontario that it would no longer pay them to monitor the level of COVID-19 in the population, a program that measured how much of that virus and others is circulating in the community.