Wastewater-based epidemiology: global collaborative to maximize contributions in the fight against COVID-19

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel member of the Coronaviridae family, has been identified as the etiologic agent of an ongoing pandemic of severe pneumonia known as COVID-19. To date there have been millions of cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in 184 countries with case fatality rates ranging from 1.8% in Germany to 12.5% in Italy. Limited diagnostic testing capacity and asymptomatic and oligosymptomatic infections result in significant uncertainty in the estimated extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Recent reports have documented that infection with SARS-CoV-2 is accompanied by persistent shedding of virus RNA in feces in 27% to 89% of patients at densities from 0.8 to 7.5 log10 gene copies per gram. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in feces raises the potential to survey sewage for virus RNA to inform epidemiological monitoring of COVID-19, which we refer to as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), but is also known as environmental surveillance.