Patterns of SARS-CoV-2 circulation revealed by a nationwide sewage surveillance programme, the Netherlands, August 2020 to February 2022
Michiel van Boven, Wouter A Hetebrij, Arno Swart, Erwin Nagelkerke, Rudolf FHJ van der Beek, Sjors Stouten, Rudolf T Hoogeveen, Fuminari Miura, Astrid Kloosterman, Anne-Merel R van der Drift, Anne Welling, Willemijn J Lodder, Ana Maria de Roda Husman- Virology
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
- Epidemiology
Background
Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater offers a near real-time tool to track circulation of SARS-CoV-2 at a local scale. However, individual measurements of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage are noisy, inherently variable and can be left-censored.
Aim
We aimed to infer latent virus loads in a comprehensive sewage surveillance programme that includes all sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the Netherlands and covers 99.6% of the Dutch population.
Methods
We applied a multilevel Bayesian penalised spline model to estimate time- and STP-specific virus loads based on water flow-adjusted SARS-CoV-2 qRT-PCR data for one to four sewage samples per week for each of the more than 300 STPs.
Results
The model captured the epidemic upsurges and downturns in the Netherlands, despite substantial day-to-day variation in the measurements. Estimated STP virus loads varied by more than two orders of magnitude, from ca 1012 virus particles per 100,000 persons per day in the epidemic trough in August 2020 to almost 1015 per 100,000 in many STPs in January 2022. The timing of epidemics at the local level was slightly shifted between STPs and municipalities, which resulted in less pronounced peaks and troughs at the national level.
Conclusion
Although substantial day-to-day variation is observed in virus load measurements, wastewater-based surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 that is performed at high sampling frequency can track long-term progression of an epidemic at a local scale in near real time.