Monitoring wastewater for the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 gives hospitals at least a warning period of more than a week in the event of a Covid-19 wave. For intensive care units, that is about twice as long. Austrian scientists have been able to prove this in a nationwide study.
“Waste-based epidemiology has been used in Austria since April 2020 to monitor the development of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This is happening with an increasing number of sewage treatment plants. In August 2022, 123 such systems were already involved. This covered about 70 percent of the (Austrian; note) population of about nine million people,” wrote Wolfgang Rauch of the Department of Environmental Technology at the University of Innsbruck and his co-authors in the specialist medium “Science of The Total Environment”. .
Wastewater and deposit counts in the picture
Institutions and research facilities from almost all over Austria (Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Graz, Bregenz) involved in the Austrian project on wastewater epidemiology related to Covid-19 contributed to the work. For the study, SARS-CoV concentrations in untreated municipal wastewater were correlated with short-term deposits in Austrian hospitals.
“The time course from sewage-based epidemiology (on Covid-19; note) to hospital occupancy allows prediction models to be made,” the experts wrote. And this is what the accuracy of the environmental engineers’ models looks like: “The results show a potential to predict the viral load in the wastewater with respect to hospital coverage (in Covid 19 patients; note), with the average lead for the use of normal wards between 8.6 and 11.6 days, for beds in intensive care units 14.8 to 17.7 days.”
System makes predictions possible
According to the scientists, this would make it possible to predict the use of the public health system in the future relatively quickly. The accuracy increases with the area distribution of such a system. “The results showed an increase in forecast accuracy with the increasing number of wastewater treatment plants monitored,” the experts noted. However, the system can also be adapted – quasi “learning” – to the emergence of new virus variants and the development of immunity in the population through overcome diseases and/or vaccinations.
Source: Krone
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