Image: VOLKER Weihbold
For the intensive care units, it is about twice as long. Austrian scientists have been able to prove this in a nationwide study. “Wastewater-based epidemiology has been used in Austria since April 2020 to monitor the development of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This is being done with an ever-growing number of sewage treatment plants. By August 2022, 123 such plants were already involved. This covered around 70 percent of the (Austrian; note) population of around nine million people”, wrote Wolfgang Rauch from the Department of Environmental Technology at the University of Innsbruck and his co-authors in “Science of The Total Environment” (February 9; online) .
Institutions and research facilities from practically all over Austria (Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Graz, Bregenz) involved in the Austrian project on wastewater epidemiology related to Covid-19 contributed to the work. For the study, the SARS-CoV concentrations in untreated municipal wastewater were correlated with the short-term deposit counts in Austrian hospitals.
“The time lead of the epidemiology based on sewage (on Covid-19; note) to the occupancy of the hospitals allows the creation of forecast models,” wrote the experts. And this is how the accuracy of the environmental technicians’ models looks like: “The results show a potential for predicting the virus load in the wastewater with regard to the hospital cover (with Covid 19 patients; note), with the average lead for the utilization of normal wards being between 8.6 and 11.6 days, for beds in intensive care units 14.8 to 17.7 days.”
According to the scientists, this would make it possible to predict the use of the public health system relatively quickly in the future. The accuracy increases with the areal distribution of such a system. “The results showed an increase in prediction accuracy with the increasing number of wastewater plants that were monitored,” the experts stated. However, the system can also be adapted – quasi “learning” – to the emergence of new virus variants and the development of immunity in the population due to diseases and/or vaccinations that have been overcome.
Source: Nachrichten
