Publications Repository - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

The COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented health and economic impacts worldwide. Various fields of science
approached this topic to better understand the pandemic’s spread characteristics and provide a factual base for nonpharmaceutical interventions. One of the interesting non-invasive methodologies, wastewater epidemiology, looks for
the correlation between the outcomes of the wastewater-based PCR analysis and the epidemiological situation in their
catchment (e.g., Bogler et al., 2020; Farkas et al., 2020). This approach may efficiently predict the outbreak in the
endemic phase when the conventional testing is usually underrated. Therefore a visual analytical tool may be beneficial
for observing the spatiotemporal correlations of the wastewater indicators and the focal incidence levels. However,
based on the analysis of existing tools (Naughton et al., 2021), most dashboards integrating wastewater indicators do
not use information about geographical space at all, or the functionality of the map component is limited to the
identification of the particular wastewater plant.
In the where2test project (www.where2test.de), we established a scalable operational data store (ODS) to automatically
collect, store and integrate heterogeneous epidemiology-related data for various administrative levels of several
European countries, focusing primarily on the region of Saxony. The project includes various activities, including
spatiotemporal analyses (Mertel et al., 2022), epidemiological models and applications (Davoodi et al., 2022), and
forecasts. In this paper, we present a prototype of an interactive dashboard to explore the correlation between the local
incidence as estimated by conventional testing and the wastewater-based PCR indicators (cT values) in Saxony.
Another goal of this application is to focus on the geospatial aspect of these data.
The top part of the dashboard features an interactive timeline linked to a multidimensional heatmap. Here, the user can
navigate in time and explore the correlation between the epidemiological situation of the neighborhood of the
wastewater plants (defined by the temporal distance) and the cT indicators in time. For the week selected in the
timeline, the user can observe the spatial context within the Saxonian municipalities on the map below. The map allows
interaction with the single municipalities and all the wastewater plants integrated with our ODS to access detailed
information and additional charts. In the future, we plan to integrate more metrics and parameters that may be beneficial
for exploring spatiotemporal inference. Our scalable infrastructure also easily allows the integration of more wastewater
plants. The application is available on www.where2test.de/wastewater from August 2022.