Presence of SARS-Coronavirus-2 RNA in Sewage and Correlation with Reported COVID-19 Prevalence in the Early Stage of the Epidemic in The Netherlands

By G. Medema, L. Heijnen, G. Elsinga, R. Italiaander, A. Brouwer. Environmental Science and Technology Letters, 2020

1,430 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, a significant proportion of cases shed SARS-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) with their faeces. To determine if SARS-CoV-2 RNA was present in sewage during the emergence of COVID-19 in The Netherlands, sewage samples of six cities and the airport were tested using four qRT-PCR assays, three targeting the nucleocapsid gene (N1–N3) and one the envelope gene (E). No SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected on February 6, 3 weeks before the first Dutch case was reported. On March 4/5, one or more gene fragments were detected in sewage of three sites, in concentrations of 2.6–30 gene copies per mL. In Amersfoort, N3 was detected in sewage 6 days before the first cases were reported. As the prevalence of COVID-19 in these cities increased in March, the RNA signal detected by each qRT-PCR assay increased, for N1–N3 up to 790–2200 gene copies per mL. This increase correlated significantly with the increase in reported COVID-19 prevalence. The detection of the virus RNA in sewage, even when the COVID-19 prevalence is low, and the correlation between concentration in sewage and reported prevalence of COVID-19, indicate that sewage surveillance could be a sensitive tool to monitor the circulation of the virus in the population.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7852efd874e376d325ce91afb103d73b14a9b66

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Citations in the corpus

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, neutral): “, 2011) and recently used for SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in untreated wastewater (Ahmed et al., 2020; Medema et al., 2020; Kocamemi et al., 2020).”
Temporal Detection and Phylogenetic Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in Municipal Wastewater (2020, methodology): “To concentrate SARS-CoV-2, we used ultrafiltration with spin concentrators that efficiently recover viruses from wastewater.(11,18) Extracted RNA was used as a template for one-step quantitative reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), performed according to Centers for Disease Con”