Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 28, 2025
Quantification and Whole Genome Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in Wastewater and Air Samples
Published on: June 30, 2023
Dynamic SARS-CoV-2 surveillance model combining seroprevalence and wastewater concentrations for post-vaccine disease
Rochelle H Holm1, Grzegorz A Rempala2, Boseung Choi2,3,4
1Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute, School of Medicine, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40202, USA.
Background:
Despite wide scale assessments, it remains unclear how large-scale severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccination affected the wastewater concentration of the virus or the overall disease burden as measured by hospitalization rates.
Methods:
We used weekly SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentration with a stratified random sampling of seroprevalence, and linked vaccination and hospitalization data, from April 2021-August 2021 in Jefferson County, Kentucky (USA). Our susceptible ( ), vaccinated ( ), variant-specific infected ( and ), recovered ( ), and seropositive ( ) model ( ) tracked prevalence longitudinally. This was related to wastewater concentration.
Results:
Here we show the 64% county vaccination rate translate into about a 61% decrease in SARS-CoV-2 incidence. The estimated effect of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant emergence is a 24-fold increase of infection counts, which correspond to an over 9-fold increase in wastewater concentration. Hospitalization burden and wastewater concentration have the strongest correlation (r = 0.95) at 1 week lag.
Conclusions:
Our study underscores the importance of continuing environmental surveillance post-vaccine and provides a proof-of-concept for environmental epidemiology monitoring of infectious disease for future pandemic preparedness.
