The changes in people’s daily lives in the face of the covid-19 pandemic range from households recovering from loss, to households reorganizing livelihoods practices to industry shifts in, for example, food provision practices. Covid led to the emergence of new research units, for example SA MRC led a waste-water surveillance system across the country, that required the upskilling on numerous sample collectors, and research capacity. In the water ways research of the Future Water institute at the University of Cape Town, the covid context forced the project to pause – a slow science of sorts was imposed by the covid restrictions. Thinking across some of these changes in water research, water science (and the ethics of surveillance) and the pace of research projects, this paper reflects on water ways research trajectories in the post-covid context; unpacking the ways in which Covid is still felt in South Africa through an exploration of emergent water research in the post-covid context, this paper tracks how the (post) covid experience has opened new topics in water research. Using the case study of the PaWS research site, we track one water ways focused project’s needs to pivot, change pace, and adjust research practices in the covid context – we then pan out to the national South African context to consider the way in which waste water surveillance, as an emergent key tool to understand the covid virus epidemiology during the covid lock down periods has had to pivot in the post-covid context. This paper will aim to bring together both of these water research related pivots driven by the covid context, and then explore the tensions in the practices and fields that have since emerged, while prising open space to explore some key emergent ethical issues.