Wastewater Monitoring for Sars-Cov-2: Concentration and Normalization

Wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) is an important tool that can be used to gather nearly real time data on the presence of infectious diseases to make important public health decisions. In light of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, researchers are concentrating, extracting, and quantifying the RNA of SAR-CoV-2 in wastewater. Such data can be critical in rapidly evolving situations. To evaluate the extent of infection in a community associated with collected sewage, it may be helpful to normalize concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 wastewater strength. This research has three overarching goals: (1) Compare wastewater concentration methods for samples collected with passive samplers (e.g., tampons); (2) Monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 on campus; (3) Evaluate parameters for normalizing concentrations of SARS-CoV-2. For this study, three methods of wastewater concentration were evaluated: Ceres Nanotrap, Concentrating Pipette Select (Innova), and 4S salt-silica. Regarding Goal 2, we monitored a virus that is used as a fecal indicator: Pepper Mild Mottle virus (PMMoV), as well as the following common wastewater constituents: biochemical oxygen demand (COD), total organic carbon (TOC), suspended solids, and conductivity. We collected wastewater, using tampons as passive samplers, every day over 53 days from two manholes at Bucknell University, which serve approximately 300 students, and weekly from a local wastewater treatment plant. Bucknell’s wastewater is collected using tampons due to their cost effectiveness. Statistical tests were conducted to compare wastewater concentration methods, and a correlation matrix was created to evaluate the relationship of the virus concentration (PMMoV) with the measured wastewater constituents. All statistical analyses are being done in R Studio.