For an area, identify the slopes, watersheds, and concentration areas, that are optimal to take samples just before fall into downstream or into a bigger watershed is not hard if you can process a Digital Elevation Model(DEM) for this area, and calculate low track and concentration areas, perhaps processing partial DEM model or DMT to calculate Topographic Position Index and identify paths
Wastewater has biomarkers that indicate the health of the entire community, that was also proved with other diseases, as poliovirus.
Analyzing wastewater provides a way to understand community health in a manner that provides rapid and sensitive analysis of an entire community without conveying any personally identifiable information. Privacy and Confidentiality is granted at this level.
The presence of SARS-CoV-2 ARN fragments per liter of wastewater sampled in the wastewater accounts for a collective of individual samples that include both, diagnosed and undiagnosed cases in the community, performs as community-level viral biomarker flag, part of a set of tools to address important public health questions.
Can be useful to early detect areas with infected people, and address measures selectively, adopting and implementing better strategies.
This method, can also help in countries with more limited resources as a tool to do surveillance of the virus circulation on the population, where waste water system does not exist, or is uncontrolled, and streams were not disinfected.
The Waste water feeds along the slopes of natural route, more or less channeled, grouping into watersheds that was bound to specific polygonal area, which will converge in their natural collectors, and thus to the lowest level points.
Our long term secondary goal as team is make a simple data model to calculate trends on low level of infection curve, and establish thresholds as a long-term target, can be more simple and cheap in front of individual screening, or other measures. Process local opendata with sample results with python to generate a MVP, to integrate this info on a GiS browser information.
Most part of Earth's ground has not opendata for watersheds, water downstream, catch and discharges of subterranean/surface water for human use. We'll try to use Satelite data to set sample points and their nexus with upstream water.
References: List the data and resources used in our project:
https://www.scdhec.gov/environment/environmental-data-maps-reports/gis-apps-data
https://arset.gsfc.nasa.gov/water/webinars/VIC18
https://arset.gsfc.nasa.gov/water/webinars/drought17
https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/
ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/version2/SRTM3/
http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/wp-content/uploads/files/250m/
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/
Fragments from Planet Team (2018). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://api.planet.com
(3) Four researchers from the Water Research Institute in the Netherlands (KWR Water Research Institute) discussed this subject and examined the samples of wastewater collected from 7 different cities. In the sample test with the RT-PCR protocol, the researchers tested 3 fragments (N-1,2,3) of the "nucleocapsid" protein gene and a fragment (E) of the "envelope" protein gene. The first samples were taken on February 6, 3 weeks before the first Covid-19 case reported in the Netherlands. No trailer was detected. In the samples taken later on March 5, the N1 trailer was detected in 5 cities. In the samples taken on March 15, the N1 trailer showed positive results in 6 cities, while the N3 and E fragments in 5 cities. Thus, the detection of the virus was reported for the first time with sewage waste water. Same for Conneticut Research, and Paris processing wartewater samples previously stored at 4ºC.
Papers:
(0) Presence of SARS-Coronavirus-2 RNA in Sewage and Correlation with Reported COVID-19 Prevalence in the Early Stage of the Epidemic in The Netherlands.Gertjan Medema, Leo Heijnen, Goffe Elsinga, Ronald Italiaander, and Anke Brouwer.Environmental Science & Technology Letters. DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00357
(1) Presence of SARS-Coronavirus-2 in sewage. Gertjan Medema, Leo Heijnen, Goffe Elsinga, Ronald Italiaander, Anke Brouwer doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.29.20045880
(2) SARS-CoV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases. Fuqing Wu, Amy Xiao, Jianbo Zhang, Xiaoqiong Gu, Wei Lin Lee, Kathryn Kauffman, William Hanage, Mariana Matus, Newsha Ghaeli, Noriko Endo, Claire Duvallet, Katya Moniz, Timothy Erickson, Peter Chai, Janelle Thompson, Eric Alm. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.05.20051540
(4)Evaluation of lockdown impact on SARS-CoV-2 dynamics through viral genome quantification in Paris wastewaters. Sebastien Wurtzer, Vincent Marechal, Jean-Marie Mouchel, Yvon Maday, Remy Teyssou, Elise Richard, Jean Luc Almayrac,Laurent Moulin ORCID Profile doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062679