SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater foreshadow dynamics and clinical presentation of new COVID-19 cases
Name
2020.06.15.20117747v2.full.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
6.88 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a0bb74fd1894d96dbd66c2db81ff63e7
Author(s)
Wu, Fuqing
Xiao, Amy
Zhang, Jianbo
Moniz, Katya
Endo, Noriko
Armas, Federica
Bonneau, Richard
Brown, Megan A
Bushman, Mary
Chai, Peter R
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Science of the Total Environment
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Wu, Fuqing, Xiao, Amy, Zhang, Jianbo, Moniz, Katya, Endo, Noriko et al. 2022. "SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater foreshadow dynamics and clinical presentation of new COVID-19 cases." Science of the Total Environment, 805.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Current estimates of COVID-19 prevalence are largely based on symptomatic, clinically diagnosed cases. The existence of a large number of undiagnosed infections hampers population-wide investigation of viral circulation. Here, we quantify the SARS-CoV-2 concentration and track its dynamics in wastewater at a major urban wastewater treatment facility in Massachusetts, between early January and May 2020. SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in wastewater on March 3. SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater correlated with clinically diagnosed new COVID-19 cases, with the trends appearing 4-10 days earlier in wastewater than in clinical data. We inferred viral shedding dynamics by modeling wastewater viral load as a convolution of back-dated new clinical cases with the average population-level viral shedding function. The inferred viral shedding function showed an early peak, likely before symptom onset and clinical diagnosis, consistent with emerging clinical and experimental evidence. This finding suggests that SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater may be primarily driven by viral shedding early in infection. This work shows that longitudinal wastewater analysis can be used to identify trends in disease transmission in advance of clinical case reporting, and infer early viral shedding dynamics for newly infected individuals, which are difficult to capture in clinical investigations.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SCITOTENV.2021.150121
