City-wide wastewater genomic surveillance through the successive emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha and Delta variants


Brunner, FS ORCID: 0000-0002-6571-6945, Brown, MR, Bassano, I, Denise, H, Khalifa, MS, Wade, M, Kevill, JL, Jones, DL, Farkas, K, Jeffries, AR et al (show 3 more authors) (2022) City-wide wastewater genomic surveillance through the successive emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha and Delta variants. [Preprint]

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Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been essential to provide an evidence base for public health decisions throughout the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Sequencing data from clinical cases has provided data crucial to understanding disease transmission and the detection, surveillance, and containment of outbreaks of novel variants, which continue to pose fresh challenges. However, genomic wastewater surveillance can provide important complementary information by providing estimates of variant frequencies which do not suffer from sampling bias, and capturing all variants circulating in a population. Here we show that genomic SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance can detect fine-scale differences within urban centres, specifically within the city of Liverpool, UK, during the emergence of Alpha and Delta variants between November 2020 and June 2021. Overall, the correspondence between wastewater and clinical variant frequencies demonstrates the reliability of wastewater surveillance. Yet, discrepancies between the two approaches when the Alpha variant was first detected emphasises that wastewater monitoring can also capture missing information resulting from asymptomatic cases or communities less engaged with testing programmes, as found by a simultaneous surge testing effort across the city.</jats:p>

Item Type: Preprint
Uncontrolled Keywords: Genetics, Vaccine Related, Prevention, Clinical Research, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Human Genome, Biodefense, 3 Good Health and Well Being
Divisions: Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 17 Oct 2022 13:34
Last Modified: 15 Mar 2024 17:45
DOI: 10.1101/2022.02.16.22269810
Open Access URL: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.02.16.22269810
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3165445
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