RAPID: Tracking the Coronovirus in municipal wastewater

Engineering - The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused major human health and economic impacts. One of the most critical questions is determining who is infected to help understand how rapidly the outbreak has progressed. With the continuing mismatch between testing need and capacity, alternative methods are needed to assess the outbreak. Further difficulty in monitoring the outbreak results from the fact that most infected individuals do not show COVID-19 symptoms immediately. These issues limit the ability of decision makers to determine where outbreaks are occurring within their communities, when outbreaks start, and when outbreaks slow or stop. The goal of this project is to address such limitations by developing the science behind monitoring the spread of the disease through community wastewater surveillance. To achieve this goal, the research will measure SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the wastewater system. This new detection method will allow for decision makers to assess potential outbreaks before symptomatic people request testing. In addition, results will help determine which communities have infected individuals. This is particularly important to assess whether the COVID-19 outbreak is slowing in response to interventions.

The goal of this project is to determine the onset, duration, termination, and location of the COVID-19 outbreak via wastewater surveillance. This work will test two hypotheses that: 1) SARS-CoV2 virus RNA concentrations in sewage and stormwater correlates with the initiation, progression, and decline of a community?s aggregate COVID-19 infection; 2) Spatial sampling within a sewer system network can isolate the location of COVID-19 hotspots within a given community. To test these hypotheses, two objectives will be completed: 1) SARS-CoV2 RNA in four Clean Water Services (CWS, Washington County, Oregon) wastewater treatment facilities and stormwater collection systems will be quantified using reverse transcriptase droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (RT-ddPCR) on a weekly basis. In the wastewater treatment plants, SARS-CoV2 RNA will be quantified in liquid primary clarifier effluent and in primary clarifier solids. At stormwater collection systems, SARS-CoV2 RNA will be quantified from the liquid and solid fractions. 2) SARS-CoV2 RNA will be quantified using RT-ddPCR at 12 selected sampling points throughout the CWS sewer system network on a biweekly basis through June, 2020, and monthly for the remainder of the project. The results will be incorporated into a GIS system containing publicly available demographic databases to identify COVID-19 hotspots and possible underlying contributing factors. The results of this work will demonstrate the feasibility of using wastewater collected at a centralized treatment facility to monitor COVID-19 outbreaks for an entire community. A second outcome of this work will determine how SARS-CoV2 RNA partitions between wastewater solids and liquid factions. Additionally, this work will determine if stormwater is a potential reservoir of SARS-CoV2 RNA during a COVID-19 outbreak. Finally, this work will demonstrate how sampling throughout a sewer line network can identify COVID-19 outbreak hotspots. If successful, this research could lead to other similar monitoring efforts for other viral outbreaks and protect the public health of the Nation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.