Nationwide Trends in COVID-19 Cases and SARS-CoV-2 RNA Wastewater Concentrations in the United States
Name
acsestwater.1c00434.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.6 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
070acf8ba9151840dc95c8e4ecc020ca
Author(s)
Duvallet, Claire
Wu, Fuqing
McElroy, Kyle A
Imakaev, Maxim
Endo, Noriko
Xiao, Amy
Zhang, Jianbo
Floyd-O’Sullivan, Róisín
Powell, Morgan M
Mendola, Samuel
Date Issued
2022
Journal
ACS ES&T Water
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Duvallet, Claire, Wu, Fuqing, McElroy, Kyle A, Imakaev, Maxim, Endo, Noriko et al. 2022. "Nationwide Trends in COVID-19 Cases and SARS-CoV-2 RNA Wastewater Concentrations in the United States." ACS ES&T Water, 2 (11).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as a promising technology for population-level surveillance of COVID-19. In this study, we present results of a large nationwide SARS-CoV-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 SARS-CoV-2, wastewater-based epidemiology can serve as a passive surveillance approach for detecting changing dynamics or resurgences of the virus.
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/10.1021/ACSESTWATER.1C00434
