Nationwide SARS-CoV-2 Surveillance Study for Sewage and Sludges of Wastewater Treatment Plants in Turkey

  1. Bilge Alpaslan Kocamemi
  2. Halil Kurt
  3. Ahmet Sait
  4. Hamza Kadi
  5. Fahriye Sarac
  6. Ismail Aydın
  7. Ahmet Mete Saatci
  8. Bekir Pakdemirli

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Abstract

1.

Since the announcement of the pandemic of Covid-19 by WHO on March 11, 2020, the countries have started to monitor surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 through medical tests. However, people with no and very light symptoms are usually not medically tested or never hospitalized and they are missed. In the study of Wu et al. [1], it was realized that the urine and faeces of all infected people contain SARS-CoV-2. After that, sewage, and sludge-based SARS-CoV-2 surveillance studies have gained significant importance around the world (Fig.1). SARS-CoV-2 was detected in wastewaters in The Netherlands [2,3,4], USA [1,5,6,7, 8, 9, 10], Australia [11], France [12, 13, 14], China [15], Spain [16,17,18,19,20], Italy [21, 22,23], Israel [24], Turkey[25], Germany[26], Japan [27,28], India [29,30], Pakistan [31], Brazil [32,33], Chile [34], Denmark, France, Belgium[35], Equator [36] and Sweden [37] using different virus concentration techniques. Published data show that high concentrations of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA reaches to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). On 7 th of May 2020, Turkey took its place among a few country which have been started wastewater based surveillance studies at the early stages of pandemic by reporting SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR levels of major WWTPs of Istanbul [25]. Turkey [38] first detected SARS-CoV-2 in both primary and waste activated sludges of Istanbul WWTPs. Later, USA [39] and Spain [40] were also studied on sludge samples. There are also studies evaluating the SARS-CoV-2 in WWTPs effluents [10,13,14, 28, 29,30, 34, 36].

This study aimed to scan distribution of Covid-19 through Turkey by SARS-CoV-2 measurements in influent, effluent and sludge samples of WWTPs. The influent, effluent and sludge samples were collected from main WWTPs located in 81 cities of Turkey through May 2020-July 2020. Among those 81 cities, Istanbul metropole with 15.5 million inhabitants was chosen as the pilot city since 65% of all cases in Turkey were present here. Hence, all treatment plants in Istanbul were scanned through the study. The viral activity tests were also conducted for the influent, effluent and sludge samples resulting high qPCR.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.29.20240549: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    RNA was determined both qualitatively and quantitatively by Thermo NanoDrop 2000c (Penzberg, Germany).
    Thermo NanoDrop
    suggested: None

    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.

    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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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.29.20240549v1 on medRxiv