Rebeca Cardim Falcao - Can wastewater viral load predict Covid and other respiratory infections hospitalizations?

Wastewater data is a promising tool for the surveillance and monitoring infectious diseases. However, a complete understanding of the relationship between the viral load measured in the wastewater treatment plants and the infections and their severity in the population is lacking. Because of their noisy nature, there is a need to identify and standardize proper methodologies for utilizing wastewater data as an auxiliary tool to assess disease spread in the population. We developed predictive models of hospitalizations for COVID-19, RSV and FLU-A using wastewater viral load adjusting for humidity, temperature, and precipitation. We further quantified the additional predictive ability of wastewater in addition to past data on hospitalizations. We show that including wastewater viral load improves the prediction of hospitalizations. Moreover, we present the model results for catchment areas of different wastewater treatment plants.

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10/10/2023 7:50:00 PM