Comprehensive and Temporal Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in Urban Water Bodies: Early Signal of Second Wave Onset

  1. Manupati Hemalatha
  2. Athmakuri Tharak
  3. Harishankar Kopperi
  4. Uday Kiran
  5. C. G. Gokulan
  6. Rakesh K Mishra
  7. S Venkata Mohan

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Abstract

The possible faecal-oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through domestic discharges has emerged as a serious public health concern. Based on persistence of the virus in environment, the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) enabled the surveillance of infection in a community. The water bodies connected to the anthropogenic activities have strong possibility of presence of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. In this work, we monitored urban, peri-urban and rural lakes in and around Hyderabad as a long-term surveillance study for presence of enteric virus SARS-CoV-2 gene fragments. The study time of seven months coincided with the first and second wave of COVID-19 infection. The study depicted differential viral RNA copies in the urban lake with high viral load observed during the peaks of wave I and wave II. Distinct variability in viral genes detection was observed amongst all five lakes which were in concordance with the human activity of the catchment area. The SARS-CoV-2 genes were not detected in peri-urban and rural lakes, whereas the urban lakes having direct functional attributes from domestic activity, in the community showed presence of viral load. The outcome of the study clearly shows that the urban water streams linked with domestic discharge will function as a proxy for wastewater epidemiological studies. The surge in viral gene load from February 2021 sample suggests the on shoot of the second wave of infection, which correlated well with the prevailing pandemic situation. Implementation of regular WBE based monitoring system for the water bodies/wastewater in the urban and semi-urban areas will help to understand the outbreak and spread of virus in the community.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.08.21256881: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsField Sample Permit: Week 2 (14/10/2020) and Week 3 (21/10/2020) samples were not collected due to the occurrence of multiple rainfall events. 2.2. Sample Fractionation: After collection, samples were packed in a disposable pack to avoid leakage during the transportation.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Cell Line Authenticationnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Experimental Models: Cell Lines
    SentencesResources
    Long term surveillance (weekly and monthly) was performed for UL-1 with two samples (lake and lake outlet) for four weeks (Week-1 (7/10/2020); Week-4 (28/10/2020); Week-5 (04/11/2020)); Week-6 (18/11/2020)) and monthly monitoring for 7 months (October 2020 to April 2021) were collected.
    Week-5
    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.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.05.08.21256881v1 on medRxiv