Wastewater-Based Epidemiology: Global Collaborative to Maximize Contributions in the Fight Against COVID-19
Aaron Bivins, Devin North, Ahmad Arslan, Warish Ahmed, Eric J. Alm, Frederic Béen, Prosun Bhattacharya, Lubertus Bijlsma, Alexandria B. Boehm, Joe Brown, Gianluigi Buttiglieri, Vincenza Calabrò, Annalaura Carducci, Sara Castiglioni, Zeynep Cetecioglu Gurol, Sudip Chakraborty, Federico Costa, Stefano Curcio, Francis L. de los Reyes, Jeseth Delgado Vela, Kata Farkas, Xavier Fernandez-Casi, Charles P. Gerba, Daniel Gerrity, Rosina Gironés, Raúl González, Eiji Haramoto, Angela Harris, Patricia A. Holden, Md. Tahmidul Islam, Davey L. Jones, Barbara Kasprzyk‐Hordern, Masaaki Kitajima, Nadine Kotlarz, Manish Kumar, Keisuke Kuroda, Giuseppina La Rosa, Francesca Malpei, Mariana Mautus, Sandra L. McLellan, Gertjan Medema, John Scott Meschke, Jochen F. Mueller, Ryan J. Newton, David Nilsson, Rachel T. Noble, Alexander L.N. van Nuijs, Jordan Peccia, T. Alex Perkins, Amy J. Pickering, Joan B. Rose, Glòria Sánchez, Adam L. Smith, Lauren B. Stadler, Christine Stauber, Kevin V. Thomas, Tom van der Voorn, Krista R. Wigginton, Kevin Zhu, Kyle Bibby
Abstract
From the article: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel member of the Coronaviridae family, has been identified as the etiologic agent of an ongoing pandemic of severe pneumonia known as COVID-19. To date there have been millions of cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in 184 countries with case fatality rates ranging from 1.8% in Germany to 12.5% in Italy. Limited diagnostic testing capacity and asymptomatic and oligosymptomatic infections result in significant uncertainty in the estimated extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Recent reports have documented that infection with SARS-CoV-2 is accompanied by persistent shedding of virus RNA in feces in 27% to 89% of patients at densities from 0.8 to 7.5 log10 gene copies per gram. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in feces raises the potential to survey sewage for virus RNA to inform epidemiological monitoring of COVID-19, which we refer to as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), but is also known as environmental surveillance. ...