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2023
Paper (Preprint, Research Paper, Review Paper, White Paper, etc.)
Titel
Estimating the Covid-19 Prevalence from Wastewater
Titel Supplements
Preprint published on Research Square. Version 1, posted 22 Nov, 2023
Abstract
Wastewater based epidemiology has become a widely used tool for monitoring trends of concentrations of different pathogens, most notably and widespread of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Therefore, in 2022, also in Rhineland-Palatinate, the Ministry of Science and Health has included 16 wastewater treatment sites in a surveillance program providing biweekly samples. However, the mere viral load data is subject to strong fluctuations and has limited value for political deciders on its own. Therefore, by commissioning the prevalence study SentiSurv, carried out by the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate has put itself in the fortunate position of having time series of both, the viral load in wastewater and the representative prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in the population. Our main contribution is a calibration study based on the data from 2023-01-08 until 2023-10-01 where we identified a scaling factor (0.208 +/- 0.031) and a delay (5.07 +/- 2.30 days) between the PMMoV-normalized virus load and the self-reported prevalence with the aid of an adequate epidemiological model. We show how that can be used to estimate the prevalence when the cohort data is no longer available and how to use it as a forecasting instrument several weeks ahead of time. We show that the calibration and forecasting quality and the resulting factors depend strongly on how wastewater samples are normalized.
Author(s)