Nationwide Trends in COVID-19 Cases and SARS-CoV-2 RNA Wastewater Concentrations in the United States
Open Access
- 3 May 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in ACS ES&T Water
- Vol. 2 (11), 1899-1909
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acsestwater.1c00434
Abstract
Wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as a promising technology for population-level surveillance of COVID19. In this study, we present results of a large nationwide SARSCoV-2 wastewater monitoring system in the United States. We profile 55 locations with at least six months of sampling from April 2020 to May 2021. These locations represent more than 12 million individuals across 19 states. Samples were collected approximately weekly by wastewater treatment utilities as part of a regular wastewater surveillance service and analyzed for SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations. SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations were normalized to pepper mild mottle virus, an indicator of fecal matter in wastewater. We show that wastewater data reflect temporal and geographic trends in clinical COVID-19 cases and investigate the impact of normalization on correlations with case data within and across locations. We also provide key lessons learned from our broad-scale implementation of wastewater-based epidemiology, which can be used to inform wastewater-based epidemiology approaches for future emerging diseases. This work demonstrates that wastewater surveillance is a feasible approach for nationwide population-level monitoring of COVID-19 disease. With an evolving epidemic and effective vaccines against SARSCoV-2, wastewater-based epidemiology can serve as a passive surveillance approach for detecting changing dynamics or resurgences of the virus.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institutes of Health (K23DA044874, R44DA051106)
- China Evergrande Group
- Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness
This publication has 37 references indexed in Scilit:
- An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real timeThe Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2020
- Epidemiology of the silent polio outbreak in Rahat, Israel, based on modeling of environmental surveillance dataProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018
- Detection of Pathogenic Viruses in Sewage Provided Early Warnings of Hepatitis A Virus and Norovirus OutbreaksApplied and Environmental Microbiology, 2014
- Detection of Imported Wild Polioviruses and of Vaccine-Derived Polioviruses by Environmental Surveillance in EgyptApplied and Environmental Microbiology, 2012
- A new real-time PCR method to overcome significant quantitative inaccuracy due to slight amplification inhibitionBMC Bioinformatics, 2008
- Evaluation of time profile reconstruction from complex two-color microarray designsBMC Bioinformatics, 2008
- RNA Viral Community in Human Feces: Prevalence of Plant Pathogenic VirusesPLoS Biology, 2005
- Concentration and detection of SARS coronavirus in sewage from Xiao Tang Shan Hospital and the 309th HospitalJournal of Virological Methods, 2005
- Dosage-dependent over-expression of genes in the trisomic region of Ts1Cje mouse model for Down syndromeHuman Molecular Genetics, 2004
- Active surveillance for Vibrio cholerae O1 and vibriophages in sewage water as a potential tool to predict cholera outbreaksJournal of Clinical Microbiology, 1996