ArticlePLOS global public health2024
Precision public health in schools enabled by wastewater surveillance: A case study of COVID-19 in an Upstate New York middle-high school campus during the 2021-2022 academic year.
Article in PLOS global public health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Community-level wastewater influenza concentrations and school attendance in Jefferson County, Kentucky (2022-2025).Journal of water and health · 2026Article
- Performance and suitability of wastewater based-surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 RNA in public schools.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- School-level data on COVID-19 cases, quarantines, and student absenteeism during the COVID-19 pandemic: understanding missingness.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Precision public health after Covid-19: a scoping review.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Community case study: an academia-industry-government partnership that monitors and predicts outbreaks in Tri-County Detroit area since 2017.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Wastewater surveillance provides a cost-effective and non-invasive way to gain an understanding of infectious disease transmission including for COVID-19. We analyzed wastewater samples from one school site in Jefferson County, New York during the 2021-2022 school year. We tested for SARS-CoV-2 RNA once weekly and compared those results with the clinical COVID-19 cases in the school. The amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA correlated with the number of incident COVID-19 cases, with the best correlation being one day lead time between the wastewater sample and the number of COVID-19 cases. The sensitivity and positive predictive value of wastewater surveillance to correctly identify any COVID-19 cases up to 7 days after a wastewater sample collection ranged from 82-100% and 59-78% respectively, depending upon the amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the sample. The specificity and negative predictive value of wastewater surveillance to correctly identify when the school was without a case of COVID-19 ranged from 67-78% and 70-80%, respectively, depending upon the amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the sample. The lead time observed in this study suggests that transmission might occur within a school before SARS-CoV-2 is identified in wastewater. However, wastewater surveillance should still be considered as a potential means of understanding school-level COVID-19 trends and is a way to enable precision public health approaches tailored to the epidemiologic situation in an individual school.
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Registered trials
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