‘Wastewater can help discern viral spread’

AHMEDABAD: The viral load in wastewater can give a fair indication of the pandemic spread and trend. That is the conclusion of a recent analysis of wastewater of Ahmedabad, Vadodara, and Gandhinagar carried out by the researchers from IIT-Gn and Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre (GBRC).The paper, ‘Comparative analysis of SARS-CoV-2 RNA load in wastewater from three different cities of Gujarat, India’, was authored by Vaibhav Srivastava, Shilangi Gupta, Arbind Kumar Patel, and Manish Kumar of IIT-Gn. From GBRC, Madhvi Joshi was the author. The paper was recently uploaded on MedRxiv for peer review.The paper said that Ahmedabad, which has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in Gujarat, had the second largest RNA copies at 2,968 per 1 lakh litre of wastewater based on the analysis of nine wastewater plants. Vadodara had the highest concentration at 3,078. Gandhinagar had 354 RNA copies per 1 lakh litre of water, added the study.The study included three genes — N, ORF1ab and S — for analysis. S and ORF were the highest in Vadodara whereas the N gene was more prominent in Ahmedabad. The samples were collected in the first week of November 2020. .