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      COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Outbreak Monitoring using Wastewater-Based Epidemiology in Qatar

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          Abstract

          Raw municipal wastewater from five wastewater treatment plants representing the vast majority of the Qatar population was sampled between the third week of June 2020 and the end of August 2020, during the period of declining cases after the peak of the first wave of infection in May 2020. The N1 region of the SARS-CoV-2 genome was used to quantify the viral load in the wastewater using RT-qPCR. The trend in Ct values in the wastewater samples mirrored the number of new daily positive cases officially reported for the country, confirmed by RT-qPCR testing of naso-pharyngeal swabs. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in 100% of the influent wastewater samples (7,889 ± 1,421 copy/L – 542,056 ± 25,775 copy/L, based on the N1 assay). A mathematical model for wastewater-based epidemiology was developed and used to estimate the number of people in the population infected with COVID-19 from the N1 Ct values in the wastewater samples. The estimated number of infected people in the population on any given day using the wastewater-based epidemiology approach declined from 542,313 ± 51,159 to 31,181 ± 3,081 over the course of the sampling period, which was significantly higher than the officially reported numbers. However, seroprevalence data from Qatar indicates that diagnosed infections represented only about 10% of actual cases. The model estimates were lower than the corrected numbers based on application of a static diagnosis ratio of 10% to the RT-qPCR identified cases, which is assumed to be due to the difficulty in quantifying RNA losses as a model term. However, these results indicate that the presented WBE modelling approach allows for realistic assessment of incidence trend in a given population, with a more reliable estimation of the number of infected people in a population at any given point in time than can be achieved using human biomonitoring alone.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Sci Total Environ
          Sci Total Environ
          The Science of the Total Environment
          The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
          0048-9697
          1879-1026
          9 February 2021
          9 February 2021
          : 145608
          Affiliations
          [a ]Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation, P. O. Box, 34110, Doha, Qatar
          [b ]Genomics Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q), Cornell University, Doha, Qatar
          [c ]Infectious Disease Epidemiology Group, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, Cornell University, Doha, Qatar
          [d ]Hamad Medical Corporation, Doha, Qatar
          [e ]Drainage Network Operation & Maintenance Department; Public Works Authority, Doha, Qatar
          Author notes
          [* ]Corresponding authors.
          [1]

          Contributed equally to this work.

          Article
          S0048-9697(21)00676-8 145608
          10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145608
          7870436
          33607430
          f75eaea7-ce66-49e4-b46e-060dae618641
          © 2021 The Author

          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
          : 16 November 2020
          : 13 January 2021
          : 29 January 2021
          Categories
          Article

          General environmental science
          sars-cov-2,covid-19,wastewater-based epidemiology (wbe),outbreaks,community,health risks

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