AQUACYCLE brings update on COVID-19 and the Urban Water Cycle

ESAMUR, one of two research teams from Spain in the AQUACYCLE partnership, has been actively monitoring for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in domestic wastewater in the region of Murcia.

In our May 2020 Special Issue of our e-Newsletter on COVID-19 and the Urban Water Cycle, Pedro Simón Andreu, AQUACYCLE Teamleader and Technical Director of ESAMUR explained how monitoring can serve both as an early indicator of the prevalence of COVID-19 in a community and help authorities to coordinate the exit strategy to gradually lift coronavirus lock-down measures.

We invited Pedro to bring an update on these investigations which ESAMUR is carrying out in collaboration with the Spanish National Research Council. More specifically, we invited his view as to whether it proved feasible to directly correlate the results of the monitoring of domestic wastewater with the number of people infected in a community.