Quantitative Trend Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in Municipal Wastewater Exemplified with Sewershed-Specific COVID-19 Clinical Case Counts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We present and demonstrate a quantitative statistical linear trend analysis ( QTA ) approach to analyze and interpret SARS-CoV-2 RNA wastewater surveillance results concurrently with clinical case data. This demonstration is based on the work completed under the Ontario (Canada) Wastewater Surveillance Initiative (WSI) by two laboratories in four large sewersheds within the Toronto Public Health (TPH) jurisdiction. The sewersheds were sampled over a 9-month period and data were uploaded to the Ontario Wastewater Surveillance Data and Visualization Hub ( Ontario Dashboard ) along with clinical case counts, both on a sewershed-specific basis. The data from the last 5-months, representing a range of high and low cases, was used for this demonstration. The QTA was conducted on a sewershed specific approach using the recommendations for public health interpretation and use of wastewater surveillance data by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC). The interpretation of the QTA results was based on the integration of both clinical and wastewater virus signals using an integration matrix in an interim draft guide by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). The key steps in the QTA consisted of (i) the calculation of Pepper Mild Mottle Virus (PMMoV), flow and flow-PMMoV-normalized virus loads; (ii) computation of the linear trends including interval estimation to identify the key inflection points using a segmented linear regression method and (iii) integrated interpretations based on consideration of both the cases and wastewater signals, as well as end user actionability. This approach is considered a complementary tool to commonly used qualitative analyses of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater and is intended to directly support public health decisions using a systematic quantitative approach.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".