Wastewater-based Epidemiology a Tool to Track Community Spread of SARS-CoV-2

Alexander E Brun*, Christopher Anderson, Brian Lemme, Brian Hendricks, Gordon Smith, Timothy Driscoll, and Emily Garner
Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation No.: 52

Assigned Category (Presentation Format): Engineering (Poster Presentations)

Student’s Major: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Monitoring wastewater for genetic markers of disease has emerged as a valuable tool for tracking incidence of disease at the community level. Wastewater monitoring for RNA fragments associated with SARS-CoV-2 has been used around the world throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to track disease and provide warning for disease reemergence. The cooperation of public health professionals, governments officials, and researchers is essential to facilitate wastewater monitoring programs. This project aims to develop a network for monitoring SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater from communities throughout the State of West Virginia. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, a pilot project was conducted by collecting samples from the Star City wastewater treatment plant, in Morgantown, WV as well as from through the WVU campus. Samples of wastewater were collected via autosampler at selected sites in the areas and tested using droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR). The presence of N1 and N2 genes of SARS-CoV-2 was found in wastewater. Results collected during the duration of the pilot project indicate that this project can be used on a variety of scales.

Funding: West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau of Public Health

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: WVU's SURE program (Rita Rio & Michelle Richards-Babb)