The EPA has been too busy responding to the deadly coronavirus to work on its long-awaited proposal to manage huge volumes of pathogen-infested sewage and stormwater during heavy rains, the agency’s top wastewater official said Wednesday.

“We think we have a potential path forward,” said Andrew Sawyers, director of the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Wastewater Management, said in a webinar on water priorities for the year.

But “with Covid-19, there are a lot of things under consideration,” he said, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“We will provide additional information on timing and potentially when we can move this forward,” Sawyers said about the wastewater rule.