More than a month ago Boston officials announced they would set up 11 new wastewater-testing sites to address the troubling fact that COVID-19 testing rates have been plummeting in the city. However, they’ve declined to offer further details.

While the plans still seem to be in place to improved Boston’s COVID-detection network, city officials have made no commitment on when they’ll be able to release more information on the program.

The initiative was announced during a Dec. 5 City Council meeting on pandemic recovery. Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC), unveiled a $3.9 million investment in wastewater screening.

The city plans to partner with BioBot, a company already monitoring wastewater elsewhere in Massachusetts, to create the 11 new sites to perform weekly tests measuring local COVID rates. That data would be integrated into the city’s existing COVID-reporting infrastructure, such as regular community meetings and the city’s online COVID dashboard.

That same dashboard reveals a possible reason for the initiative’s urgency. While rates of infection and hospitalization remain low in Boston, testing has plummeted well past the city government’s alarm thresholds. COVID test positivity, the metric that the city uses to determine whether enough testing is being done, is supposed to be below 4 percent. The city has designated anything above 5 percent to be worth attention from officials. BPHC data shows Boston currently at 14 percent positivity.

An alternate alarm threshold city officials set for themselves is when four or more neighborhoods are above 8 percent. There are currently 15 neighborhoods above 8 percent.

Testing has been falling, with only 5,600 tests performed citywide in the work week ending Jan. 2. That’s down around 8 percent from the week before, when Boston performed 6,100 tests.

“One of our most important investments is in wastewater surveillance,” Ojikutu said in her announcement. “As COVID testing has decreased significantly across the city, we need to understand transmission and spread within our communities.”

The testing sites could also help identify new variants moving into the area, or be tapped to collect community data on other diseases and opioid use. During her Dec. 5 statements, Ojikutu said the city was “in discussions” with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and BioBot about those expanded uses. Since then, however, further details have not emerged.

Mayor Michelle Wu’s office declined several requests by The Guardian to comment on this article, and could not or would not say where the testing sites would be located. So no further details on the program are available. The most specificity that the public has on when more information will be released is a statement from the BPHC saying that it “will have more to share on this in the coming weeks.”