Application of Skimmed-Milk Flocculation Method for Wastewater Surveillance of COVID-19 in Kathmandu, Nepal
Application of Skimmed-Milk Flocculation Method for Wastewater Surveillance of COVID-19 in Kathmandu, Nepal
Blog Article
Wastewater surveillance (WS) has been used globally as a complementary tool to monitor the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) throughout the pandemic.However, a concern about the appropriateness of WS in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) exists due to low sewer coverage and expensive viral concentration methods.In this study, influent wastewater samples (n = 63) collected from two wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) of the Kathmandu Valley between CONDITIONER March 2021 and February 2022 were concentrated using the economical skimmed-milk flocculation method (SMFM).The presence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was tested by qPCR using assays that target the nucleocapsid (N) and envelope (E) genes.
Overall, 84% (53/63) of the total samples were positive for SARS-CoV-2 according to at least one of the tested HEALTHY LUNGS assays, with concentrations ranging from 3.5 to 8.3 log10 gene copies/L, indicating the effectiveness of the SMFM.No correlation was observed between the total number of COVID-19 cases and SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater collected from the two WWTPs (p > 0.
05).This finding cautions the prediction of future COVID-19 waves and the estimation of the number of COVID-19 cases based on wastewater concentration in settings with low sewer coverage by WWTPs.Future studies on WS in LMICs are recommended to be conducted by downscaling to sewer drainage, targeting a limited number of houses.Overall, this study supports the notion that SMFM can be an excellent economical virus-concentrating method for WS of COVID-19 in LMICs.