SARS-CoV-2 detection from the built environment and wastewater and its use for hospital surveillance
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Patients hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infections are major contributors to morbidity and mortality in health care settings. Our understanding of the distribution of this virus in the built health care environment and wastewater, and relationship to disease burden, is limited. We performed a prospective multi-center study of environmental sampling of SARS-CoV-2 from hospital surfaces and wastewater and evaluated their relationships with regional and hospital COVID-19 burden. We validated a qPCR-based approach to surface sampling and collected swab samples weekly from different locations and surfaces across two tertiary care hospital campuses for a 10-week period during the pandemic, along with wastewater samples. Over the 10-week period, 963 swab samples were collected and analyzed. We found 61 (6%) swabs positive for SARS-CoV-2, with the majority of these ( n = 51) originating from floor samples. Wards that actively managed patients with COVID-19 had the highest frequency of positive samples. Detection frequency in built environment swabs was significantly associated with active cases in the hospital throughout the study. Wastewater viral signal changes appeared to predate change in case burden. Our results indicate that environment sampling for SARS-CoV-2, in particular from floors, may offer a unique and resolved approach to surveillance of COVID-19.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255159: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Research ethics board approval was obtained through the Ottawa Health Science Network Research Ethics Board (OHSN-REB) for this study. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some limitations which have not already been noted. Firstly, our study was performed during a period when there was relatively low activity, with regional case counts ranging from approximately 2 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255159: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Research ethics board approval was obtained through the Ottawa Health Science Network Research Ethics Board (OHSN-REB) for this study. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some limitations which have not already been noted. Firstly, our study was performed during a period when there was relatively low activity, with regional case counts ranging from approximately 2 to 7 cases per 100,000 population per week, and it is possible that in higher burden settings there could be saturation of ward-based built environment detection which could limit the correlation with burden or outbreaks. Secondly, outbreaks were relatively rare in our hospital, owing in part to the low regional burden, and this limits our ability to evaluate the ability of built environment screening to consistently detect outbreaks. Lastly, our approaches only detect viral RNA and not viable virus. However, our findings benefit from the generalizability of our approaches which use standard PCR techniques and could be easily and quickly performed in most settings worldwide. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the detection of SARS-CoV-2 from wastewater and built environment samples, in particular from floors, parallels hospital burden. Built environment sampling may offer a spatially-resolved method for surveillance of hospital COVID-19 cases which can be paired with wastewater monitoring for a comprehensive picture of facility-wide burden of infection. Further prospective studies are needed to evaluate this approach.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
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.
-
