A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) causing corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has attracted global attention due to its highly infectious and pathogenic properties. Most of current studies focus on aerosols released from infected individuals, but the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater also should be examined. In this review, we used bibliometrics to statistically evaluate the importance of water-related issues in the context of COVID-19. The results show that the levels and transmission possibilities of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater are the main concerns, followed by potential secondary pollution by the intensive use of disinfectants, sludge disposal, and the personal safety of workers. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater requires more attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the most effective techniques, i.e., wastewater-based epidemiology and quantitative microbial risk assessment, for virus surveillance in wastewater are systematically analyzed. We further explicitly review and analyze the successful operation of a sewage treatment plant in Huoshenshan Hospital in China as an example and reference for other sewage treatment systems to properly ensure discharge safety and tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. This review offers deeper insight into the prevention and control of SARS-CoV-2 and similar viruses in the post-COVID-19 era from a wastewater perspective.
It is difficult to recognize specific fouling mechanisms due to the complexity of practical feed water, thus the current studies usually employ foulant surrogates to carry out research, such as alginate and xanthan gum. However, the representativeness of these surrogates is questionable. In this work, the classical surrogates (i.e., alginate and xanthan gum) were systematically studied, and results showed that they behaved differently during filtration. For the mixture of alginate and xanthan gum, both filtration behaviors and adsorption tests performed by quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) indicated that alginate plays a leading role in fouling development. Furthermore, by examining the filtration behaviors of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) extracted from practical source water, it turns out that the gel layer formation is responsible for EPS fouling, and the properties of gel layer formed by EPS share more similarities with that formed from pectin instead of alginate. In addition, with the use of experimental data sets extracted from this study and our previous studies, a modeling method was established and tested by the support vector machine (SVM) to predict complex filtration behaviors. Results showed that the small differences of fouling mechanisms lying between alginate and pectin cannot be recognized by Hermia’s models, and SVM can show a discrimination as high as 76.92%. As such, SVM may be a powerful tool to predict complex filtration behaviors.
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