home .Featured, Coronavirus, Water Systems #COVID19 Journal Club: “SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary municipal sewage sludge as a leading indicator of COVID-19 outbreak dynamics”

#COVID19 Journal Club: “SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary municipal sewage sludge as a leading indicator of COVID-19 outbreak dynamics”

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Yet another wastewater surveillance study for SARS-CoV-2.  Seems to be the hot topic these days.  This is a great paper by Jordan Peccia and colleagues.  They collected wastewater samples over the course of a couple months and saw how well those correlated with testing data and hospital admissions.  Not only were the correlations extremely high, but wastewater was a leading indicator in both cases.  This is the strongest argument to date of the important of this kind of surveillance.  Abstract below:

We report a time course of SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary sewage sludge during the Spring COVID-19 outbreak in a northeastern U.S. metropolitan area. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in all environmental samples and, when adjusted for the time lag, the virus RNA concentrations were highly correlated with the COVID-19 epidemiological curve (R2=0.99) and local hospital admissions (R2=0.99). SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations were a seven-day leading indicator ahead of compiled COVID-19 testing data and led local hospital admissions data by three days. Decisions to implement or relax public health measures and restrictions require timely information on outbreak dynamics in a community.

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