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. 2021 May 15:769:144852.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.144852. Epub 2021 Jan 14.

Survey of rapid development of environmental surveillance methods for SARS-CoV-2 detection in wastewater

Nicolette A Zhou  1 , Courtney Tharpe  2 , John Scott Meschke  1 , Christobel M Ferguson  3
Affiliations

Survey of rapid development of environmental surveillance methods for SARS-CoV-2 detection in wastewater

Nicolette A Zhou et al. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

Environmental surveillance as a part of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) of SARS-CoV-2 can provide an early, cost-effective, unbiased community-level indicator of circulating COVID-19 in a population. The objective of this study was to determine how widely SARS-CoV-2 detection in wastewater is being investigated and what methods are used. A survey was developed and distributed, with results showing that methods were rapidly applied to conduct SARS-CoV-2 WBE, primarily to test wastewater influent from large urban wastewater treatment plants. Additionally, most methods utilized small wastewater volumes and the primary concentration methods used were polyethylene glycol precipitation, membrane filtration and centrifugal ultrafiltration followed by nucleic acid extraction and assay for primarily nucleocapsid gene targets (N1, N2, and/or N3). Since this survey was performed, many laboratories have continued to optimize and implement a variety of methods for SARS-CoV-2 WBE. Method comparison studies completed since this survey was conducted will assist in developing WBE as a supplemental tool to support public health and policy decision making responses.

Keywords: Environment surveillance; SARS-CoV-2; Virus concentration; Wastewater; Wastewater-based epidemiology.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

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Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Word cloud of reported job titles.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Sampling processing and analysis flow diagram.
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Fig. 3
Breakdown of virus dissociation methods used.
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Fig. 4
Primary concentration methods utilized by survey respondents. PEG is polyethylene glycol. UF is ultrafiltration.
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Fig. 5
Percent of respondents reporting volume processed and final volume after concentration.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Secondary concentration methods utilized by survey respondents. PEG is polyethylene glycol. UF is ultrafiltration.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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