Wastewater and seroprevalence for pandemic preparedness: variant analysis, vaccination effect, and hospitalization forecasting for SARS-CoV-2, in Jefferson County, Kentucky.

Abstract

Despite wide scale assessments, it remains unclear how large-scale SARS-CoV-2 vaccination affected the wastewater concentration of the virus or the overall disease burden as measured by hospitalization rates. We used weekly SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentration with a stratified random sampling of seroprevalence, and linked vaccination and hospitalization data, from April 2021-August 2021 in Jefferson County, Kentucky (USA). Our susceptible $\left(S\right)$, vaccinated $\left(V\right)$, variant-specific infected $\left(I_1\right)$ and $\left(I_2\right)$, recovered $\left(R\right)$, and seropositive $\left(T\right)$ model $\left(SV{I}_{2}RT\right)$ tracked prevalence longitudinally. This was related to wastewater concentration. The 64% county vaccination rate translated into about 61% decrease in SARS-CoV-2 incidence. The estimated effect of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant emergence was a 24-fold increase of infection counts, which corresponded to an over 9-fold increase in wastewater concentration. Hospitalization burden and wastewater concentration had the strongest correlation (r = 0.95) at 1 week lag. Our study underscores the importance of continued environmental surveillance post-vaccine and provides a proof-of-concept for environmental epidemiology monitoring of infectious disease for future pandemic preparedness.