Wastewater Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 as a Predictive Metric of Positivity Rate for a Major Metropolis

  1. L.B. Stadler
  2. K.B. Ensor
  3. J.R. Clark
  4. P. Kalvapalle
  5. Z. W. LaTurner
  6. L. Mojica
  7. A. Terwilliger
  8. Y. Zhuo
  9. P. Ali
  10. V. Avadhanula
  11. R. Bertolusso
  12. T. Crosby
  13. H. Hernandez
  14. M. Hollstein
  15. K. Weesner
  16. D.M. Zong
  17. D. Persse
  18. P.A. Piedra
  19. A.W. Maresso
  20. L. Hopkins

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Abstract

Wastewater monitoring for SARS-CoV-2 has been suggested as an epidemiological indicator of community infection dynamics and disease prevalence. We report wastewater viral RNA levels of SARS-CoV-2 in a major metropolis serving over 3.6 million people geographically spread over 39 distinct sampling sites. Viral RNA levels were followed weekly for 22 weeks, both before, during, and after a major surge in cases, and simultaneously by two independent laboratories. We found SARS-CoV-2 RNA wastewater levels were a strong predictive indicator of trends in the nasal positivity rate two-weeks in advance. Furthermore, wastewater viral RNA loads demonstrated robust tracking of positivity rate for populations served by individual treatment plants, findings which were used in real-time to make public health interventions, including deployment of testing and education strike teams.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.04.20226191: (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

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    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.

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    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.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.04.20226191v1 on medRxiv