Correlation between SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration in wastewater and COVID-19 cases in community: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Moving forward with COVID-19: Future research prospects of wastewater-based epidemiology methodologies and applications

“…This leads to the generation of inconsistent data from different testing facilities such that results may not be comparable within or among different programs or jurisdictions. A recent literature survey and meta-analysis indicated highly varying performances and very low comparability of different wastewater surveillance studies in estimating the COVID-19 cases [ 18 ]. Diverse sampling and analytical methods were identified as contributing factors for low accuracy and reproducibility for virus quantification in wastewater [ 17 ].…”

“…As a wastewater-based approach, WBE inherently neglects environmental factors (e.g., weather), epidemic intervention (e.g., masking or social distancing), and pharmaceutical treatment (e.g., vaccination) [ 2 ]. Our recent systematic review found that the correlation between severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) concentration in wastewater and clinically confirmed cases ranged from −0.38 to 0.99 [ 18 ]. These findings highlight the limitations of current WBE for viral diseases, including low accuracy and irreproducible results, and the lack of advanced data analytics to make the best use of WBE data.…”

Early detection of local SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks by wastewater surveillance: a feasibility study

“…Worldwide, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is increasingly used as a tool to monitor the spread of COVID-19 in the community. The method has proven to be successful in describing epidemiological trends by identifying and quantifying the virus RNA in wastewater samples [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Additionally, as increasing trend in wastewater may be found prior to those identified by individual testing, it is proposed to be useful for early warning [13][14][15][16][17].…”

Prediction of COVID-19 positive cases, a nation-wide SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based epidemiology study

“…Systematic meta-analysis of impact of these factors on WBE performance has been carried out by Li et al (2022a) , differences arising from methodological approaches have been reviewed by Kopperi et al (2021) , systematic review to assess the performance of WW surveillance as early warning system of COVID-19 community transmission was carried out by Shah et al (2022) , and uncertainties in estimating SARS-CoV-2 prevalence by WBE were explored by Li et al (2022b) . In general, many studies demonstrate the great potential of WBE as a public health tool, but also refer to the uncertainties and unexpected variability arising from factors such as the properties of the sewer network, sampling and quantification methods and approach for population normalisation.…”