AI Article Synopsis
- - During the pandemic, Western Australia managed to keep COVID-19 cases low, mostly limited to quarantined individuals and small clusters until 2022.
- - Researchers analyzed wastewater samples from treatment plants and found they could detect SARS-CoV-2 genomes with high accuracy, even from a small number of infected individuals in large populations.
- - This genomic analysis of wastewater can help monitor outbreaks and understand transmission dynamics, proving to be more useful for disease surveillance than previously thought.
Article Abstract
After a limited first wave of community transmission in March 2020 and until 2022, Western Australia was largely free of COVID-19, with cases restricted to hotel quarantine, commercial vessels, and small, infrequent community clusters. Despite the low case load setting, sequencing of wastewater samples from large municipal treatment plants produced SARS-CoV-2 genomes with coverage up to 99.7 % and depth to 4000×, which was sufficient to link wastewater sequences to those of active cases in the catchment at the time. This study demonstrates that ≤5 positive individuals can be enough to produce high genomic coverage (>90 %) assemblies even in catchments of up to a quarter of a million people. Genomic analysis of wastewater contemporaneous with clinical cases can also be used to rule out transmission between cases in different catchments, when their SARS-CoV-2 genomes have distinguishing nucleotide polymorphisms. These findings reveal a greater potential of wastewater WGS to inform outbreak management and disease surveillance than previously recognized.
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Source |
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9398818 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.158266 | DOI Listing |
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