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The CITA, the Aragonese Institute of Water and Public Health will carry out this study, which aims to be a surveillance system to be able to adopt containment measures in an agile manner. 12 treatment plants have been selected in which weekly sampling will be carried out for three months.
The Government of Aragon is going to promote an early warning system for the detection of coronavirus in wastewater, with the intention that it serve as a method of epidemiological surveillance throughout the territory and allow the rapid adoption of public policies against outbreaks.
The Aragon Agri-Food Research and Technology Center (CITA), the Aragonese Water Institute (IAA) and the General Directorate of Public Health are responsible for carrying out this study, which is based on performing PCR analyzes on samples of 12 purifiers of the Autonomous Community in search of genetic material that warns of the presence of SARS-CoV-2.
Different scientific publications have shown that the virus is excreted in the feces of both diagnosed and asymptomatic people, so the detection of the virus RNA in wastewater could be a crucial tool to warn of the circulation of the coronavirus, as well as its incidence in a community.
The treatment plants have been selected based on their demographic situation and population distribution, so the ten treatment plants have been chosen from the towns with more than 10.000 inhabitants -Huesca, Jaca, Barbastro, Monzón, Fraga, Teruel, Alcañiz, Ejea de los Caballeros, Calatayud and Tarazona - to which Caspe and Binéfar are added due to their current epidemiological situation. Treatment plants that serve several different municipalities, as is the case of Utebo, are not included, due to the subsequent difficulty of relating the input data to their population origin.
The Aragonese capital is also left out, since the Zaragoza-La Cartuja WWTP is included in the state-level sampling program that is already being carried out by the Ministries of Health and for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. Precisely, the regional study will use the same methodology as the state one - prepared by the CSIC -, which will allow a subsequent homogeneity and correlation of the analytical data obtained in Aragon and in the rest of the country.
Weekly sampling of untreated wastewater will be carried out over twelve weeks in each of the aforementioned treatment plants. Samples are taken automatically every 15 minutes from 8.00:12.00 a.m. to XNUMX:XNUMX p.m., which is when the highest viral load is known to exist. All samples will be mixed, forming a single one, so that randomness is limited.
The analyzes will be carried out in the level 3 biosafety and animal molecular biology laboratories of CITA and under the supervision as technical managers of two researchers from CITA and the ARAID Foundation. The results will be communicated to Public Health within a maximum period of 72 hours.
