Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wu, Fuqing
• Xiao, Amy
• Zhang, Jianbo
• Moniz, Katya
• Endo, Noriko
• Armas, Federica
• Bonneau, Richard
• Brown, Megan A.
• Bushman, Mary
• Chai, Peter R.
• Duvallet, Claire
• Erickson, Timothy B.
• Foppe, Katelyn
• Ghaeli, Newsha
• Gu, Xiaoqiong
• Hanage, William P.
• Huang, Katherine H.
• Lee, Wei Lin
• Matus, Mariana
• McElroy, Kyle A.
• Nagler, Jonathan
• Rhode, Steven F.
• Santillana, Mauricio
• Tucker, Joshua A.
• Wuertz, Stefan
• Zhao, Shijie
• Thompson, Janelle
• Alm, Eric J.

Titel

SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater foreshadow dynamics and clinical presentation of new COVID-19 cases

Ist Teil von

• The Science of the total environment, 2022-01, Vol.805, p.150121-150121, Article 150121

Ort / Verlag

Netherlands: Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ScienceDirect journals Piacenza

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Current estimates of COVID-19 prevalence are largely based on symptomatic, clinically diagnosed cases. The existence of a large number of undiagnosed infections hampers population-wide investigation of viral circulation. Here, we quantify the SARS-CoV-2 concentration and track its dynamics in wastewater at a major urban wastewater treatment facility in Massachusetts, between early January and May 2020. SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in wastewater on March 3. SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater correlated with clinically diagnosed new COVID-19 cases, with the trends appearing 4–10 days earlier in wastewater than in clinical data. We inferred viral shedding dynamics by modeling wastewater viral load as a convolution of back-dated new clinical cases with the average population-level viral shedding function. The inferred viral shedding function showed an early peak, likely before symptom onset and clinical diagnosis, consistent with emerging clinical and experimental evidence. This finding suggests that SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater may be primarily driven by viral shedding early in infection. This work shows that longitudinal wastewater analysis can be used to identify trends in disease transmission in advance of clinical case reporting, and infer early viral shedding dynamics for newly infected individuals, which are difficult to capture in clinical investigations. [Display omitted] •SARS-CoV-2 is first detected in Massachusetts wastewater on March 3, 2020.•Viral titers in wastewater correlate with newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases.•Trends in wastewater precede 4–10 days earlier than in clinical data.•Wastewater-based shedding model reveals an early burst of high viral shedding after infection.