RAPID: Determine Community Disease Burden of COVID-19 by Probing Wastewater Microbiome

Engineering - The global COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent global health and economic crisis. The impacts of the current outbreak are exacerbated by the potential for infection outbreaks to seasonally reoccur. This potential seasonal cycling presents a great challenge to the current clinic-based disease surveillance approach which does not adequately test asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients. There is a critical need for alternative methods to assess spread, as undiagnosed infections are driving disease transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. To directly address this need, this project will develop the science to assess community infection prevalence by analyzing the wastewater microbiome, promising a rapid, sensitive, and comprehensive approach for microbial disease surveillance. Successful development will allow assessment of infection rates in the population served by the wastewater treatment plant, including those with mild or no symptoms. Such capabilities would dramatically improve surveillance of pandemics by indicating in real time where the disease is emerging in new hotspots. Such information would inform intervention strategies for controlling the current COVID-19 pandemic, and help the Nation manage future outbreaks more effectively.

This RAPID project has two specific research objectives in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first objective is to develop and optimize a highly efficient concentration and detection method for enveloped viruses (like coronavirus) in the wastewater matrix. There is urgent need for this knowledge given that the most commonly used concentration methods for viruses in water samples were developed for the non-enveloped viruses. Successful completion of this phase of the research will thus fill a major technological gap and significantly advance the capability to detect and monitor the SARS-CoV2 in water and wastewater. The second objective is to collect time-sensitive wastewater samples from communities impacted by the disease. The wastewater will be used to determine the abundance, diversity, and temporal dynamics of SARS-CoV2 and other enveloped viruses in the wastewater. These data will be analyzed to reconstruct the extent of COVID-19 community transmission. The research will generate much-needed information on community transmission of COVID-19, as well as serve to validate the wastewater-based surveillance approach. If successful, this research will provide a new avenue to protect the public health of the Nation through wastewater surveillance.

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.