The Emergence and Widespread Circulation of Enteric Viruses Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Wastewater-Based Evidence

Abstract

Growing evidence shed light on the importance of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) during the pandemic, when the patients rarely visited the clinics despite the fact that the infections were still prevalent in the community as before. The abundance of infections in the community poses a constant threat of the emergence of new epidemic strains. Herein, we investigated enteric viruses in raw sewage water (SW) from Japan’s Tohoku region and compared them to those from the Kansai region to better understand the circulating strains and their distribution across communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Raw SW was collected between 2019 and 2022, concentrated by polyethylene-glycol-precipitation method, and investigated for major AGE viruses by RT-PCR. Sequence-based analyses were used to assess genotypes and evolutionary relationships. The most commonly detected enteric virus was rotavirus A (RVA) at 63.8%, followed by astrovirus (AstV) at 61.1%, norovirus (NoV) GII and adenovirus (AdV) at 33.3%, sapovirus (SV) at 25.0%, enterovirus (EV) at 19.4%, and NoV GI at 13.9%. The highest prevalence (46.0%) was found in the spring. Importantly, enteric viruses did not decline during the pandemic. Rather, several strains like NoV GII.2, DS-1-like human G3 (equine) RVA, MLB1 AstV, and different F41 HAdV emerged throughout the pandemic and spread widely over the Tohoku and Kansai regions. Tohoku’s detection rate remained lower than that of the Kansai area (36 vs 58%). This study provides evidence for the emergence and spread of enteric viruses during the pandemic.