WasteWater as a pandemic surveillance tool #

Zhou Fang

12:30 Monday in 2Q50/51.

Part of the How to be better prepared for a future pandemic: lessons learned from COVID-19, mpox and the four historic influenza pandemics session.

Abstract #

Patients infected with COVID-19 shed virus into wastewater, leaving traces of viral RNA that can be detected and quantified through qPCR. Sampling of wastewater thus can produce a measure of prevalence for COVID-19 and possibly many other diseases. Scotland was one of the earliest countries to begin a programme of wastewater COVID-19 sampling, producing a continuous dataset lasting over two years, across over 100 sites, covering >80% of the Scottish population and with over 20,000 samples analysed. With the reducing availability of other data sources, wastewater is one of the main remaining datasets on viral prevalence and will likely also have a key role in future pandemic surveillance. This talk addresses aspects of the wastewater data that would be likely of interest to modellers interested in working with it. This includes its advantages, as well as caveats and sources of uncertainty, differences between it and other measures, technical challenges both solved and unsolved. We also review some modelling work that have made use of wastewater data in the past, and potential for future work.