Survival of Coronaviruses in Water and Wastewater

By P. Gundy, C. Gerba, Ian L. Pepper. Food and Environmnetal Virology, 2008

446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The advent of severe acute respiratory syndrome and its potential environmental transmission indicates the need for more information on the survival of coronavirus in water and wastewater. The survival of representative coronaviruses, feline infectious peritonitis virus, and human coronavirus 229E was determined in filtered and unfiltered tap water (4 and 23°C) and wastewater (23°C). This was compared to poliovirus 1 under the same test conditions. Inactivation of coronaviruses in the test water was highly dependent on temperature, level of organic matter, and presence of antagonistic bacteria. The time required for the virus titer to decrease 99.9% (T99.9) shows that in tap water, coronaviruses are inactivated faster in water at 23°C (10 days) than in water at 4°C (>100 days). Coronaviruses die off rapidly in wastewater, with T99.9 values of between 2 and 4 days. Poliovirus survived longer than coronaviruses in all test waters, except the 4°C tap water.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53ef21ff9753295ec77a126ca76178ad4b163099

Citations in the corpus

• SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater: State of the knowledge and research needs (2020, unknown): “CoVs were inactivated rapidly in wastewater, with T99 values of b3 days (Gundy et al., 2009).”
• Computational analysis of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 surveillance by wastewater-based epidemiology locally and globally: Feasibility, economy, opportunities and challenges (2020, unknown): “(1), and assuming N 0 = 100, N ( t ) = 0.1, time t = 48 – 72 h (Gundy et al., 2009) as well as fi rst-order kinetics, the half-life of SARS-CoV-2 at ambient conditions (20 °C) can be estimated to range between approximately 4.8 and 7.2 h (Table 1).”
• Comparison of virus concentration methods for the RT-qPCR-based recovery of murine hepatitis virus, a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2 from untreated wastewater (2020, unknown): “because upwards of 26% MHVs were adsorbed to organic matter within the sample (Gundy et al., 2009; Ye et al., 2016).”