ArticleApplied and environmental microbiology2021
Time Evolution of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Wastewater during the First Pandemic Wave of COVID-19 in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, Spain.
Article in Applied and environmental microbiology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
66 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 107 citations in OpenAlex.
- Recent progress on wastewater-based epidemiology for COVID-19 surveillance: A systematic review of analytical procedures and epidemiological modeling.The Science of the total environment · 2023Pooled it
- Wastewater surveillance to infer COVID-19 transmission: A systematic review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- Was severe SARS-CoV-2 substantially spreading in Northern Italy before its first detection in February 2020? An evaluation of pneumonia-associated hospitalization trends from September 2014 to February 2020.European journal of public health · 2025Article
- Epidemiological dynamics and early warning of norovirus and rotavirus A in Yantai City in 2023-2024 based on wastewater surveillance.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Unveiling the silent information of wastewater-based epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 at community and sanitary zone levels: experience in Córdoba City, Argentina.Journal of water and health · 2024Article
- A Narrative Review of High Throughput Wastewater Sample Processing for Infectious Disease Surveillance: Challenges, Progress, and Future Opportunities.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Review
- Environmental monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul (RS), Brazil.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2024Article
- Monitoring influenza and respiratory syncytial virus in wastewater. Beyond COVID-19.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Structured Ethical Review for Wastewater-Based Testing in Support of Public Health.Environmental science & technology · 2023Article
- Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater for prevalence estimation and investigating clinical diagnostic test biases.Water research · 2023Article
- Predictive potential of SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration in wastewater to assess the dynamics of COVID-19 clinical outcomes and infections.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Access to Information, and Concerns, Myths and Truths about Food Safety during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Overview of the Portuguese Population.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Structured Ethical Review for Wastewater-Based Testing.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Number of COVID-19 cases required in a population to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater in the province of Alberta, Canada: Sensitivity assessment.Journal of environmental sciences (China) · 2023Article
- Early detection of local SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks by wastewater surveillance: a feasibility study.Epidemiology and infection · 2023Article
- An exploration of challenges associated with machine learning for time series forecasting of COVID-19 community spread using wastewater-based epidemiological data.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Variant-specific SARS-CoV-2 shedding rates in wastewater.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Persistence of endogenous RNA biomarkers of SARS-CoV-2 and PMMoV in raw wastewater: Impact of temperature and implications for wastewater-based epidemiology.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Whole genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 from wastewater links to individual cases in catchments.The Science of the total environment · 2022Article
- A State-of-the-Art Scoping Review on SARS-CoV-2 in Sewage Focusing on the Potential of Wastewater Surveillance for the Monitoring of the COVID-19 Pandemic.Food and environmental virology · 2022Article
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Two large wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), covering around 2.7 million inhabitants, which represents around 85% of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, were sampled before, during, and after the implementation of a complete lockdown. Five one-step reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) assays, targeting the polymerase (IP2 and IP4), the envelope (E), and the nucleoprotein (N1 and N2) genome regions, were employed for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) RNA detection in 24-h composite wastewater samples concentrated by polyethylene glycol (PEG) precipitation. SARS-CoV-2 was detected in a sewage sample collected 41 days ahead of the declaration of the first COVID-19 case. The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 genome copies in wastewater evidenced the validity of water-based epidemiology (WBE) to anticipate COVID-19 outbreaks, to evaluate the impact of control measures, and even to estimate the burden of shedders, including presymptomatic, asymptomatic, symptomatic, and undiagnosed cases. For the latter objective, a model was applied for the estimation of the total number of shedders, evidencing a high proportion of asymptomatic infected individuals. In this way, an infection prevalence of 2.0 to 6.5% was figured. On the other hand, proportions of around 0.12% and 0.09% of the total population were determined to be required for positive detection in the two WWTPs. At the end of the lockdown, SARS-CoV-2 RNA apparently disappeared in the WWTPs but could still be detected in grab samples from four urban sewers. Sewer monitoring allowed for location of specific hot spots of COVID-19, enabling the rapid adoption of appropriate mitigation measures.
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