ArticleTropical medicine and infectious disease2023
Wastewater Surveillance Can Function as an Early Warning System for COVID-19 in Low-Incidence Settings.
Article in Tropical medicine and infectious disease, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance: approaches, challenges, and opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance in a central Chinese metropolis: variant responses and correlation with clinical cases.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Evaluation and estimation of epidemic trajectories for SARS-CoV-2 from clinical and wastewater data in Gauteng Province, South Africa.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Interpretation of indoor air surveillance for respiratory infections: a prospective longitudinal observational study in a childcare setting.EBioMedicine · 2025Observational
- Building a pathway to One Health surveillance and response in Asian countries.Science in One Health · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionDuring the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia implemented a series of international and interstate border restrictions. The state of Queensland experienced limited COVID-19 transmission and relied on lockdowns to stem any emerging COVID-19 outbreaks. However, early detection of new outbreaks was difficult. In this paper, we describe the wastewater surveillance program for SARS-CoV-2 in Queensland, Australia, and report two case studies in which we aimed to assess the potential for this program to provide early warning of new community transmission of COVID-19. Both case studies involved clusters of localised transmission, one originating in a Brisbane suburb (Brisbane Inner West) in July-August 2021, and the other originating in Cairns, North Queensland in February-March 2021. MATERIALS AND
methodsPublicly available COVID-19 case data derived from the notifiable conditions (NoCs) registry from the Queensland Health data portal were cleaned and merged spatially with the wastewater surveillance data using statistical area 2 (SA2) codes. The positive predictive value and negative predictive value of wastewater detection for predicting the presence of COVID-19 reported cases were calculated for the two case study sites.
resultsEarly warnings for local transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through wastewater surveillance were noted in both the Brisbane Inner West cluster and the Cairns cluster. The positive predictive value of wastewater detection for the presence of notified cases of COVID-19 in Brisbane Inner West and Cairns were 71.4% and 50%, respectively. The negative predictive value for Brisbane Inner West and Cairns were 94.7% and 100%, respectively.
conclusionsOur findings highlight the utility of wastewater surveillance as an early warning tool in low COVID-19 transmission settings.
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