Building health system resilience and pandemic preparedness using wastewater-based epidemiology from SARS-CoV-2 monitoring in Bengaluru, India

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic was a watershed event for wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). It highlighted the inability of existing disease surveillance systems to provide sufficient forewarning to governments on the existing stage and scale of disease spread and underscored the need for an effective early warning signaling system. Recognizing the potentiality of environmental surveillance (ES), in May 2021, COVIDActionCollaborative launched the Precision Health platform. The idea was to leverage ES for equitable mapping of the disease spread in Bengaluru, India and provide early information regarding any inflection in the epidemiological curve of COVID-19. By sampling both networked and non-networked sewage systems in the city, the platform used ES for both equitable and comprehensive surveillance of the population to derive precise information on the existing stage of disease maturity across communities and estimate the scale of the approaching threat. This was in contrast to clinical surveillance, which during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bengaluru excluded a significant proportion of poor and vulnerable communities from its ambit of representation. The article presents the findings of a sense-making tool which the platform developed for interpreting emerging signals from wastewater data to map disease progression and identifying the inflection points in the epidemiological curve. Thus, the platform accurately generated early warning signals on disease escalation and disseminated it to the government and the general public. This information enabled concerned audiences to implement preventive measures in advance and effectively plan their next steps for improved disease management.