Wastewater Surveillance Can Function as an Early Warning System for COVID-19 in Low-Incidence Settings

Abstract

Introduction: During 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 Methods: Publicly 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. Results: Early 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. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the utility of wastewater surveillance as an early warning tool in low COVID-19 transmission settings.

Keywords

• wastewater surveillance
• SARS-CoV-2
• early warning
• surveillance