Real time it-monitoring of wastewater quality in the prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

New measures are being taken in the EU member states for flexible and scalable solutions in monitoring wastewater quality. The latest scientific studies have further confirmed the presence of SARS-CoV2 virus in wastewater. This virus was also detected in stool samples of patients with COVID-19 symptoms, but also in asymptomatic cases of the disease, which confirms the possibility of faecal-oral transmission. The aim of this paper is to introduce automated real-time online monitoring in the wastewater treatment plant "Ekogramont" with the possibility of using this monitoring in the prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic. The plant is located at 1080 m above sea level and was built in the period from 1998 to 1999 for the needs of the company for bottling spring water "Vlasinska ROSA", which is now owned by the company "Coca Cola" HBC. The proposed SCADA system collects the data from the sensors located in the sewage water and delivers the obtained results to the computers in the central station. The suitability of such automated monitoring comes to the fore in extreme weather conditions which prevail in this high mountain area, when for the purposes of standard analysis, wastewater sampling is disabled. The system also contains the so-called "contamination" alarm which is activated by every parameter which exceeds the set critical limit. The standard RT-PCR protocols WHO and FDA are used to detect SARS-CoV2. The detection of the viral genome in sewage, prior to the exponential phase of the epidemic, is a valuable indicator of the imminent danger of an outbreak. In this filed, modification of legal regulations in Serbia would enable the formation of a network for automated real-time monitoring of water quality control, with continuous measurement systems that would deliver the measurement results via SCADA systems to the competent institutions.