A Wastewater-Based Epidemic Model for SARS-CoV-2 with Application to Three Canadian Cities

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated wastewater-based surveillance, allowing public health to track the epidemic by monitoring the concentration of the genetic fingerprints of SARS-CoV-2 shed in wastewater by infected individuals. Wastewater-based surveillance for COVID-19 is still in its infancy. In particular, the quantitative link between clinical cases observed through traditional surveillance and the signals from viral concentrations in wastewater is still developing and hampers interpretation of the data and actionable public-health decisions. We present a modelling framework that includes both SARS-CoV-2 transmission at the population level and the fate of SARS-CoV-2 RNA particles in the sewage system after faecal shedding by infected persons in the population. Using our mechanistic representation of the combined clinical/wastewater system, we perform exploratory simulations to quantify the effect of surveillance effectiveness, public-health interventions and vaccination on the discordance between clinical and wastewater signals. We also apply our model to surveillance data from three Canadian cities to provide wastewater-informed estimates for the actual prevalence, the effective reproduction number and incidence forecasts. We find that wastewater-based surveillance, paired with this model, can complement clinical surveillance by supporting the estimation of key epidemiological metrics and hence better triangulate the state of an epidemic using this alternative data source.

Related collections

Most cited references 83

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia

Qun Li, Xuhua Guan, Peng Wu … (2020)

Abstract Background The initial cases of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)–infected pneumonia (NCIP) occurred in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019 and January 2020. We analyzed data on the first 425 confirmed cases in Wuhan to determine the epidemiologic characteristics of NCIP. Methods We collected information on demographic characteristics, exposure history, and illness timelines of laboratory-confirmed cases of NCIP that had been reported by January 22, 2020. We described characteristics of the cases and estimated the key epidemiologic time-delay distributions. In the early period of exponential growth, we estimated the epidemic doubling time and the basic reproductive number. Results Among the first 425 patients with confirmed NCIP, the median age was 59 years and 56% were male. The majority of cases (55%) with onset before January 1, 2020, were linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as compared with 8.6% of the subsequent cases. The mean incubation period was 5.2 days (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.1 to 7.0), with the 95th percentile of the distribution at 12.5 days. In its early stages, the epidemic doubled in size every 7.4 days. With a mean serial interval of 7.5 days (95% CI, 5.3 to 19), the basic reproductive number was estimated to be 2.2 (95% CI, 1.4 to 3.9). Conclusions On the basis of this information, there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019. Considerable efforts to reduce transmission will be required to control outbreaks if similar dynamics apply elsewhere. Measures to prevent or reduce transmission should be implemented in populations at risk. (Funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and others.)

0 comments Cited 7265 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of COVID-19

Xi. He, Eric Lau, Peng Wu … (2020)

We report temporal patterns of viral shedding in 94 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and modeled COVID-19 infectiousness profiles from a separate sample of 77 infector-infectee transmission pairs. We observed the highest viral load in throat swabs at the time of symptom onset, and inferred that infectiousness peaked on or before symptom onset. We estimated that 44% (95% confidence interval, 25-69%) of secondary cases were infected during the index cases' presymptomatic stage, in settings with substantial household clustering, active case finding and quarantine outside the home. Disease control measures should be adjusted to account for probable substantial presymptomatic transmission.

0 comments Cited 2214 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

First confirmed detection of SARS-CoV-2 in untreated wastewater in Australia: A proof of concept for the wastewater surveillance of COVID-19 in the community

Warish Ahmed, Nicola Angel, Janette Edson … (2020)

Infection with SARS-CoV-2, the etiologic agent of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, is accompanied by the shedding of the virus in stool. Therefore, the quantification of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater affords the ability to monitor the prevalence of infections among the population via wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). In the current work, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was concentrated from wastewater in a catchment in Australia and viral RNA copies were enumerated using reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) resulting in two positive detections within a six day period from the same wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). The estimated RNA copy numbers observed in the wastewater were then used to estimate the number of infected individuals in the catchment via Monte Carlo simulation. Given the uncertainty and variation in the input parameters, the model estimated a median range of 171 to 1090 infected persons in the catchment, which is in reasonable agreement with clinical observations. This work highlights the viability of WBE for monitoring infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, in communities. The work also draws attention to the need for further methodological and molecular assay validation for enveloped viruses in wastewater.

0 comments Cited 812 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Epidemics

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Epidemics

Title: Epidemics

Publisher: Published by Elsevier B.V.

ISSN (Print): 1755-4365

ISSN (Electronic): 1878-0067

Publication date PMC-release: 8 April 2022

Publication date (Electronic): 8 April 2022

Electronic Location Identifier: 100560

Affiliations

[a ]Public Health Risk Sciences Division, National Microbiology Laboratory, Public Health Agency of Canada, Guelph, ON, Canada

[b ]One Health Division, National Microbiology Laboratory, Public Health Agency of Canada, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

[c ]Antimicrobial Resistance Division, Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

[d ]University of Ottawa, Department of Civil Engineering, Ottawa, ON, Canada

[e ]Public Health Laboratory, Alberta Precision Laboratory, Edmonton, AB, Canada

[f ]Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

[g ]Department of Pediatrics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

[h ]Toronto Public Health, Toronto, ON, Canada

[i ]Canadian Field Epidemiology Program, Emergency Management, Public Health Agency of Canada

Author notes

[* ]Corresponding author.

[1]

contributed equally

Article

Publisher Item ID: S1755-4365(22)00017-2 Publisher ID: 100560

DOI: 10.1016/j.epidem.2022.100560

PMC ID: 8993419

PubMed ID: 35462206

SO-VID: d99fa9ad-7524-4363-96b8-fb28f3f49804

License:

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

History

Date received : 16 August 2021

Date revision received : 7 March 2022

Date accepted : 3 April 2022

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Smart Citations

Citing PublicationsSupportingMentioningContrasting

View Citations

See how this article has been cited at scite.ai

scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.