Student Presenter(s): Yash Trivedi
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Gibb
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

Causing over 460 million cases and 6 million deaths worldwide, severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the virus responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Within the past two years, various methods, with predictive measures, for understanding infection trends, have been developed and adopted, but the relatively new field of wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) provides a unique solution to combating the spread by serving as an accessible indicator of COVID cases at the population level. It has been demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels in wastewater often increase in advance of detectable cases, so monitoring wastewater is an effective leading indicator for community-level surveillance. NYIT has its own wastewater treatment facility, so having the capability to conduct surveillance for pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 that can be detected in wastewater will enable early warning of pending outbreaks among the campus community, allowing the implementation of preventative measures that can limit the spread of a pathogen such as SARS-CoV-2. We have identified SARS-CoV-2 RNA from wastewater samples collected at NYIT in February that correlate with the Omicron spike early in 2022. Expanding upon these methods provides a realm of possibilities for public health monitoring, and can be extended to other disease-causing pathogens found in wastewater. This epidemiological investigation is part of a movement for methods to combat infectious disease as a whole.