ArticleWater research2021
Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater to evaluate the success of lockdown measures for controlling COVID-19 in the UK.
Article in Water research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Systematic Review of Gastrointestinal and Respiratory Pathogen Detection in Wastewater in Africa, with Focus on Rwanda: Implications for Early Warning and Public Health Surveillance.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of Methodological Approaches to SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Surveillance.Viruses · 2026Pooled it
- Factors influencing SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater up to the sampling stage: A systematic review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- Wastewater surveillance to infer COVID-19 transmission: A systematic review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance: approaches, challenges, and opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- Long-term biological surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in critical points for municipal sewage catchment in light of wastewater-based epidemiology, public health and environmental hygiene.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Monitoring Multiple Sexually Transmitted Pathogens Through Wastewater Surveillance.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The potential of long-term wastewater-based surveillance to predict COVID-19 waves peak in Mexico.Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · 2025Article
- Evaluation of wastewater percent positive for assessing epidemic trends - A case study of COVID-19 in Shangrao, China.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Evaluating Interlaboratory Variability in Wastewater-Based COVID-19 Surveillance.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Evaluation of Three Viral Capsid Integrity qPCR Methods for Wastewater-Based Viral Surveillance.Food and environmental virology · 2025Article
- Public health actions in response to pathogen detection in wastewater and the environment: a scoping review.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Near-source wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, norovirus, influenza virus and RSV across five different sites in the UK.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Monitoring of antimicrobial resistance genes and influenza viruses in avian-populated water bodies.Sustainable microbiology · 2025Article
- Singapore's COVID-19 Genomic Surveillance Programme: Strategies and Insights From a Pandemic Year.Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2024Article
- Genomic surveillance of Canadian airport wastewater samples allows early detection of emerging SARS-CoV-2 lineages.Scientific reports · 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
- Article
- Reconstructing SARS-CoV-2 lineages from mixed wastewater sequencing data.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest recent threats to human health, wellbeing and economic growth. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) of human viruses can be a useful tool for population-scale monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 prevalence and epidemiology to help prevent further spread of the disease, particularly within urban centres. Here, we present a longitudinal analysis (March-July 2020) of SARS-CoV-2 RNA prevalence in sewage across six major urban centres in the UK (total population equivalent 3 million) by q(RT-)PCR and viral genome sequencing. Our results demonstrate that levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA generally correlated with the abundance of clinical cases recorded within the community in large urban centres, with a marked decline in SARS-CoV-2 RNA abundance following the implementation of lockdown measures. The strength of this association was weaker in areas with lower confirmed COVID-19 case numbers. Further, sequence analysis of SARS-CoV-2 from wastewater suggested that multiple genetically distinct clusters were co-circulating in the local populations covered by our sample sites, and that the genetic variants observed in wastewater reflected similar SNPs observed in contemporaneous samples from cases tested in clinical diagnostic laboratories. We demonstrate how WBE can be used for both community-level detection and tracking of SARS-CoV-2 and other virus' prevalence, and can inform public health policy decisions. Although, greater understanding of the factors that affect SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration in wastewater are needed for the full integration of WBE data into outbreak surveillance. In conclusion, our results lend support to the use of routine WBE for monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 and other human pathogenic viruses circulating in the population and assessment of the effectiveness of disease control measures.
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