Successful Application of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology in Prediction and Monitoring of the Second Wave of COVID-19 in India with Fragmented Sewerage Systems- A Case Study of Jaipur (India)

  1. Sudipti Arora
  2. Aditi Nag
  3. Aakanksha Kalra
  4. Vikky Sinha
  5. Ekta Meena
  6. Samvida Saxena
  7. Devanshi Sutaria
  8. Manpreet Kaur
  9. Tamanna Pamnani
  10. Komal Sharma
  11. Sonika Saxena
  12. Sandeep K Shrivastava
  13. A. B. Gupta
  14. Xuan Li
  15. Guangming Jiang
1 evaluations Published on
Read the full article Related papers
This article on Sciety

Abstract

The present study tracked the city-wide dynamics of severe acute respiratory syndrome-corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) RNA in the wastewater from nine different wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in Jaipur during second wave of COVID-19 out-break in India. A total of 164 samples were collected weekly between February 19 th and June 8 th , 2021. SARS-CoV-2 was detected in 47.2% (52/110) influent samples and 37% (20/54) effluent samples. The increasing percentage of positive influent samples correlated with the city’s increasing active clinical cases during the second wave of COVID-19 in Jaipur. Furthermore, WBE based evidence clearly showed early detection of about 20 days (9/9 samples reported positive on April 20 th , 2021) prior to the maximum cases & maximum deaths reported in the city on May 8 th , 2021. The present study further observed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in treated effluents at the time window of maximum active cases in the city even after tertiary disinfection treatments of UV & Chlorine. The average genome concentration in the effluents and removal efficacy of six commonly used treatments; Activated Sludge Treatment + Chlorine disinfection (ASP + Cl 2) , Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR) with Ultraviolet radiations disinfection (MBBR + UV), MBBR + Chlorine (Cl 2 ), Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) and SBR + Cl 2 were compared with removal efficacy of SBR + Cl 2 (81.2%)> MBBR + UV (68.8%) > SBR (57.1%) > ASP (50%) > MBBR + Cl 2 (36.4%). The study observed the trends & prevalence of four genes (E, RdRp, N, and ORF1ab gene) based on two different kits and found that prevalence of N> ORF1ab >RdRp> E gene, suggested that the effective genome concentration should be calculated based on the presence/absence of multiple genes. Hence, it is imperative to say that using a combination of different detection genes (E, N, RdRp & ORF1ab genes) reduce false positives in WBE.

Graphical Abstract

<fig id="ufig1" position="float" fig-type="figure" orientation="portrait"> <graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="21263417v1_ufig1" position="float" orientation="portrait"/> </fig>

Highlights

  • Successful application of WBE with prediction of 14-20 days for COVID-19 in Jaipur

  • A comparison of SARS-CoV-2 RNA removal efficacy of 9 WWTPs was investigated

  • SBR showed better performance than MBBR with SARS-CoV-2 RNA removal from wastewater

  • Presence of SARS-CoV-2 in effluents even after UV and Chlorine disinfection

  • Using a combination of different detection genes reduce false positives in WBE

Related articles

Related articles are currently not available for this article.