Variability of Clinical Metrics in Small Population Communities Drive Perceived Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance Data Quality: Ontario, Canada-Wide Study.

ABSTRACT: The emergence of COVID-19 in Canada has led to over 4.9 million cases and 59,000 deaths by May 2024. Traditional clinical surveillance metrics (hospital admissions and clinical laboratory-positive cases) were complemented with wastewater and environmental monitoring (WEM) to monitor SARS-CoV-2 incidence. However, challenges in public health integration of WEM persist due to perceived limitations of WEM data quality, potentially driving inconsistent correlations variability and lead times. This study investigates how factors like population size, WEM measurement magnitude, site isolation status, hospital admissions, and clinical laboratory-positive cases affect WEM data correlations and variability in Ontario. The analysis uncovers a direct relationship between clinical surveillance data an

SUBMITTER: Hegazy N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11998010 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature