Wastewater Testing for Zombie Virus Leads to “Major Bust” of Underground Zombie Fighting Ring

By Bulletin Staff

A wastewater testing program intended to help communities detect, track and respond to zombie virus outbreaks has resulted in what federal officials are calling a “major bust” of an illegal underground zombie fighting ring operating along the US East Coast.

Many local water treatment systems around the nation have been testing sewage for the virus that causes COVID-19 through the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), launched by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in September 2020.

More recently the CDC’s National Center for Zombie Diseases has begun to work with communities around the nation to implement testing for the zombie virus as well, according to Tim Leary, head of the Zombie Virus Tracking System at the CDC.

“People who have been bitten by the undead will shed RNA of the zombie virus in their feces before they turn, and zombies will continue to shed RNA as they ooze bodily fluids. We’re able to detect the presence of that viral RNA in wastewater coming into a treatment plant,” Leary said. “This is just one more tool that helps us predict a surge in the living dead before an outbreak gets out of hand.”

For example, Sunnyvale, Calif., was an early adopter of the zombie virus testing program at its central water treatment center in December 2022, and the director of the city’s Office of Undead Control, Julia Fields, credits the program with alerting municipal officials to an increase in zombie virus infections this past summer.

“We began detecting a spike for several strains of the virus starting in May, and by mid-June we had clear signs that an outbreak was coming. That allowed us to request additional federal emergency zombie response resources to help us eliminate and contain the undead before they could rampage through the streets and create a much wider epidemic,” Fields said.

Testing Leads to Fighting Ring Bust

In Allentown, Penn., another early adopter, the testing program helped lead authorities to more than just a potential outbreak. It tipped them off to an illegal “zombie farm” being run out of an otherwise abandoned industrial area in the city, according to Jake Gantz, who runs the city’s Special Undead Investigations Unit.

“When the city started the program in January [2023], the wastewater testing was coming back with numbers that suggested we should have been having a major outbreak in the city. But we weren’t seeing a surge in the number of zombie attacks reported to the police or infected people showing up at hospitals or morgues. The numbers didn’t add up,” Gantz explained.

After retesting over several days repeatedly showed the same high levels, Gantz’s office worked with the city’s utilities department to narrow down the source of the zombie virus spike to a specific area of the city that is home to a number of unused industrial facilities.

An intensive search of the area turned up a decommissioned slaughterhouse packed with more than 400 of the living dead, apparently part of an undead smuggling operation. It turned out that the smugglers used an elaborate overhead sprinkler system to continually bathe the zombies in the slaughterhouse with a fine mist to keep down the stench emanating from the building.

“All the water they were washing the zombies with drained into the sewer, making it look like there was a major outbreak underway. In fact, it was just a one slaughterhouse crammed full of the dead getting a constant shower,” Gantz said.

Gantz’s unit collaborated with the FBI’s Zombie Response Team and the Pennsylvania National Guard to eliminate the undead in the slaughterhouse onsite and remove the husks for disposal at Pennsylvania’s undead incineration site in nearby Easton. They also arrested seven of the smuggler “caretakers” at the slaughterhouse.

The subsequent investigation revealed that the Allentown zombies were intended for an illegal underground high-stakes zombie fighting ring operating up and down the East Coast. A sting operation coordinated by the Justice Department’s Special Office of Organized Undead Crimes across five states led to what the department called a “major bust” of the ring in June.

Testing Is “Just One of Many Tools”

Leary said that he’s pleased that the wastewater testing program helped Sunnyvale prevent a major outbreak and assisted Allentown in shutting down the zombie smugglers and the zombie fighting ring. But he adds that the impacts of the test program won’t always be so dramatic.

“The idea behind this program is that, if it’s successful, you won’t be reading about it in the headlines because health officials will have recognized the early warning signals and been able to take preemptive steps to prevent anything newsworthy from happening,” Leary said.

He also cautioned that officials should not make snap decisions based on limited data. Rather, he said, the test results should be used in conjunction with data from other sources, including historical data on zombie outbreaks in specific areas, to ensure that the wastewater test results are put in the proper context.

“We have to view testing as just one of many tools that officials can use to understand the current state of the zombie threat in a given sector so that they can make the best-informed decisions for how to respond,” Leary said. “No one is suggesting that the military use a tactical nuke to take out a town just because one set of test results comes back showing a spike in zombie virus RNA. Not every positive test is going to lead to an Ogden Marsh incident.”

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