(Natural News) Tests conducted at a wastewater treatment plant in Massachusetts have confirmed some people’s worst nightmare: that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) persists in raw sewage.

A biotechnology startup firm known as Biobot Analytics reportedly collected samples from the facility, which is located near an unnamed metropolitan area of Massachusetts, and tested them back in March. They found evidence of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), and reported their findings in a study published in the journal medRxiv.

Though the study has yet to be peer reviewed, Eric Alm, one of its authors, emphasized that the public is not at risk of contracting the Wuhan coronavirus from wastewater particles. However, evidence that it exists there could be indicative of just how widely the virus has spread.

“Even if those viral particles are no longer active or capable of infecting humans, they may still carry genetic material that can be detected using an approach called PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which amplifies the genetic signal many orders of magnitude, creating billions of copies of the genome for each starting virus,” Alm told Newsweek.

Along with other researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Alm looked carefully at the samples and determined that some 2,300 people in the area had become infected with the virus, even though there were only 446 confirmed cases in the region.

“It was interesting that our estimation was definitely higher than the number of confirmed cases in the area,” added Mariana Matus, the CEO and co-founder of Biobot.

“They could believe that [our] numbers could be correct and not out of the realm of possibility,” she added, noting that after sharing the data they compiled with local health officials, there was agreement among all of them that perhaps many cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) went undetected.