COVID-19 wastewater based epidemiology: long-term monitoring of 10 WWTP in France reveals the importance of the sampling context

  1. A. Lazuka
  2. C. Arnal
  3. E. Soyeux
  4. M. Sampson
  5. A.-S. Lepeuple
  6. Y. Deleuze
  7. S. Pouradier Duteil
  8. S. Lacroix

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Abstract

SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been advanced as a relevant indicator of distribution of COVID-19 in communities, supporting classical testing and tracing epidemiological approaches. An extensive sampling campaign, including ten municipal wastewater treatment plants, has been conducted in different cities of France over a 20-week period, encompassing the second peak of COVID-19 outbreak in France. A well-recognised ultrafiltration – RNA extraction – RT-qPCR protocol was used and qualified, showing 5.5 +/− 0.5% recovery yield on heat-inactivated SARS-CoV-2. Importantly the whole, solid and liquid, fraction of wastewater was used for virus concentration in this study. Campaign results showed medium- to strong- correlation between SARS-CoV-2 WBE data and COVID-19 prevalence. To go further, statistical relationships between WWTP inlet flow rate and rainfall were studied and taken into account for each WWTP in order to calculate contextualized SARS-CoV-2 loads. This metric presented improved correlation strengths with COVID-19 prevalence for WWTP particularly submitted and sensitive to rain. Such findings highlighted that SARS-CoV-2 WBE data ultimately require to be contextualized for relevant interpretation.

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  1. Version published to 10.2166/wst.2021.418
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.06.21256751: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    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.

    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.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.05.06.21256751v1 on medRxiv