ABSTRACT
As global SARS-CoV-2 burden and testing frequency have decreased, wastewater surveillance has emerged as a key tool to support clinical surveillance efforts. The aims of this study were to identify and characterize SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater samples collected from urban centers across South Africa. Here we show that wastewater sequencing analyses are temporally concordant with clinical genomic surveillance and reveal the presence of multiple lineages not detected by clinical surveillance. We show that wastewater genomics can support SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological investigations by reliably recovering the prevalence of local circulating variants, even when clinical samples are not available. Further, we find that analysis of mutations observed in wastewater can provide a signal of upcoming lineage transitions. Our study demonstrates the utility of wastewater genomics to monitor evolution and spread of endemic viruses.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Wastewater , Humans , SARS-CoV-2/genetics , COVID-19/epidemiology , Wastewater-Based Epidemiological Monitoring , GenomicsABSTRACT
The last major Rift Valley fever outbreak in South Africa was between 2008 and 2011. Viruses isolated between 2008 and 2010 were phylogenetically assigned to Lineage C, Lineage K and the novel lineage H. The 2011 outbreaks occurred primarily in the Eastern, Western and Northern Cape provinces, with no sequence data or phylogenetic relationship published. Samples from these outbreaks were submitted to the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences, University of Pretoria, for immunohistochemical confirmation of Rift Valley fever phlebovirus presence. These samples were formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) and stored at the Pathology section for several years. This study describes a modified extraction method used to obtain RNA from the FFPE samples, as well as the primer combinations used to phylogenetically classify them as belonging to the novel lineage H.
