Abstract
Wastewater-based testing for SARS-CoV-2 is a novel tool for public health monitoring, but additional laboratory capacity is needed to provide routine monitoring at all locations where it has the potential to be useful. Few standardization practices for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater analysis currently exist, and quality assurance/quality control procedures may vary across laboratories. Alongside counterparts at many academic institutions, we built out a laboratory for routine monitoring of wastewater at the University of California, Berkeley. Here, we detail our group’s establishment of a wastewater testing laboratory including standard operating procedures, laboratory buildout and workflow, and a quality assurance plan. We present a complete data analysis pipeline and quality scoring framework and discuss the data reporting process. We hope that this information will aid others at research institutions, public health departments, and wastewater agencies in developing programs to support wastewater monitoring for public health decision-making.
Highlights
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a pandemic response tool that provides populationlevel public health information to complement clinical testing and other epidemiological data [1,2,3,4,5]
As wastewater monitoring enters a new phase with the implementation of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (CDC-NWSS) [17], there may be a need to expand the capacity of existing laboratories or establish new ones
We investigated a range of data management options including: 1) a custom relational database hosted locally, 2) a custom relational database hosted on an academic computing server, or 3) a commercial Laboratory inventory management system (LIMS)
Summary
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is a pandemic response tool that provides populationlevel public health information to complement clinical testing and other epidemiological data [1,2,3,4,5]. At the outset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, academic, commercial, and wastewater utility laboratories developed and optimized protocols for concentration, extraction, and quantification of SARS-CoV-2 RNA from wastewater [1, 2, 4, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. As wastewater monitoring enters a new phase with the implementation of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (CDC-NWSS) [17], there may be a need to expand the capacity of existing laboratories or establish new ones. There is an ongoing need for transparency and documentation of raw data analysis
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