The severity of a pathogen is often described in terms of a case fatality rate, or the ratio of people who die from the infection and associated disease vs. the total number of confirmed cases. Generally, the numerator (the number of deaths) is relatively easy to determine, but the true denominator can be elusive, as many infections go undetected or unreported. If infection by a pathogen leads to mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all, the true incidence rate will be difficult to determine. At a minimum, this can lead to a public health 'blindspot'/data gap, but it can also lead to inflated case fatality rates for emerging pathogens.

This episode takes a "deep dive" into the use of wastewater surveillance to more accurately quantify the number of COVID infections within a community—in this case in Las Vegas. It also describes how whole genome sequencing of wastewater samples was used to rapidly identify SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, sometimes before they were confirmed in clinical cases.

This is an AI-generated podcast created with NotebookLM based on a publication in Science of the Total Environment. The original article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.155410