ArticleThe Science of the total environment2021
On forecasting the community-level COVID-19 cases from the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater.
Article in The Science of the total environment, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- 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
- Selected Cannabinoids, Cannabimimetic Agents andPharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Remotely Controlled Continuous Surveillance of Viral RNA in Wastewater Using a LoRa Network.IEEE internet of things journal · 2026Article
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance: approaches, challenges, and opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- Coupling wastewater-based epidemiology with data-driven machine learning for managing public health risks.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- Article
- Challenges of COVID-19 Case Forecasting in the US, 2020-2021.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Monitoring of over-the-counter (OTC) and COVID-19 treatment drugs complement wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2024Article
- Online trend estimation and detection of trend deviations in sub-sewershed time series of SARS-CoV-2 RNA measured in wastewater.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Optimizing campus-wide COVID-19 test notifications with interpretable wastewater time-series features using machine learning models.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Waste management beyond the COVID-19 pandemic: Bibliometric and text mining analyses.Gondwana research : international geoscience journal · 2023Article
- Citywide wastewater SARS-CoV-2 levels strongly correlated with multiple disease surveillance indicators and outcomes over three COVID-19 waves.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Quantifying the relationship between sub-population wastewater samples and community-wide SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence.The Science of the total environment · 2022Article
- Wastewater to clinical case (WC) ratio of COVID-19 identifies insufficient clinical testing, onset of new variants of concern and population immunity in urban communities.The Science of the total environment · 2022Article
- Assessment of a mass balance equation for estimating community-level prevalence of COVID-19 using wastewater-based epidemiology in a mid-sized city.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Data modelling recipes for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based epidemiology.Environmental research · 2022Article
- Data analytics during pandemics: a transportation and location planning perspective.Annals of operations research · 2022Article
- Model-based assessment of COVID-19 epidemic dynamics by wastewater analysis.The Science of the total environment · 2022Article
- Evaluation of a Wastewater-Based Epidemiological Approach to Estimate the Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Detection of Viral Variants in Disparate Oregon Communities at City and Neighborhood Scales.Environmental health perspectives · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The building of an effective wastewater-based epidemiological model that can translate SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater to the prevalence of virus shedders within a community is a significant challenge for wastewater surveillance. The objectives of this study were to investigate the association between SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations and the COVID-19 cases at the community-level and to assess how SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations should be integrated into a wastewater-based epidemiological statistical model that can provide reliable forecasts for the number of COVID-19 infections and the evolution over time as well. Weekly variations on the SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations and COVID-19 cases from April 29, 2020 through February 17, 2021 were obtained in Borough of Indiana, PA. Vector autoregression (VAR) model with different data forms were fitted on this data from April 29, 2020 through January 27, 2021, and the performance in three weeks ahead forecasting (February 3, 10, and 17) were compared with measures of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). A stationary block bootstrapping VAR method was also presented to reduce the variability in the forecasting values. Our results demonstrate that VAR(1) estimated with the logged data has the best interpretation of the data, but a VAR(1) estimated with the original data has a stronger forecasting ability. The forecast accuracy, measured by MAPE, for 1 week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks in the future can be as low as 11.85%, 8.97% and 21.57%. The forecasting performance of the model on a short time span is unfortunately not very impressive. Also, a single increase in the SARS-CoV-2 concentration can impact the COVID-19 cases in an inverted-U shape pattern with the maximum impact occur in the third week after. The flexibility of this approach and easy-to-follow explanations are suitable for many different locations where the wastewater surveillance system has been implemented.
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