A global repository for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater data

“To progress the contribution of wastewater surveillance of the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2, a group of international partners have established a global collaborative repository for data. By Joan B Rose, Gertjan Medema, Colleen Naughton, Panagis Katsivelis and Vajra Allan.
With the rapid rise in interest in the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, Michigan State University, KWR Water Research Institute, the University of California Merced, Venthic Technologies, and PATH are collaborating to develop the Wastewater SARS Public Health Environmental REsponse, or W-SPHERE. This is a new global centre for data and for public health use cases on SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater. Its mission is to advance environmental surveillance of sewage, informing local and global efforts for monitoring and supporting public health measures to combat COVID-19.
History of COVID and monitoring – Over the one-and-a-half years since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been more than 236 million cases and 4.8 million deaths. Using methods to track community spread of other viruses such as poliovirus, environmental virologists and those in the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) field quickly adapted their existing methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Unlike data for COVID-19 cases and mortality, there was not a global dashboard to harmonise and follow the databases emerging all over the world to track wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA.”

(Citation: Rose, J.B., Medema, G.J., Naughton, C., Katsivelis, P., Allan, V. – A global repository for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater data – www.thesourcemagazine.org (2021)26 October)