Show us the data: global COVID-19 wastewater monitoring efforts, equity, and gaps

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Abstract

A year since the declaration of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there were over 110 million cases and 2.5 million deaths. Learning from methods to track community spread of other viruses such as poliovirus, environmental virologists and those in the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) field quickly adapted their existing methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Unlike COVID-19 case and mortality data, there was not a global dashboard to track wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA worldwide. This study provides a 1-year review of the “COVIDPoops19” global dashboard of universities, sites, and countries monitoring SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Methods to assemble the dashboard combined standard literature review, Google Form submissions, and daily, social media keyword searches. Over 200 universities, 1400 sites, and 55 countries with 59 dashboards monitored wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 RNA. However, monitoring was primarily in high-income countries (65%) with less access to this valuable tool in low- and middle-income countries (35%). Data were not widely shared publicly or accessible to researchers to further inform public health actions, perform meta-analysis, better coordinate, and determine equitable distribution of monitoring sites. For WBE to be used to its full potential during COVID-19 and beyond, show us the data.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.14.21253564: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Google was used to check for missing U.S. states and territories.
    Google
    suggested: (Google, RRID:SCR_017097)
    For example, a combination of “South Dakota” and “wastewater”, “sewage”, “monitoring” and “COVID-19” and “SARS-CoV-2” keywords were used to see if there were missing articles that were not found by the daily keyword searches on Twitter.
    Dakota”
    suggested: None
    GPS coordinates in WGS 84 coordinate system for the dashboard were either directly extracted if provided or approximated from the location mentioned in the source.
    WGS
    suggested: None
    ArcGIS Pro 2.6.1 was used to map the number of sites and universities monitoring wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 globally.
    ArcGIS
    suggested: (ArcGIS for Desktop Basic, RRID:SCR_011081)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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