A decline in diagnostic testing for SARS - CoV-2 is expected to delay the tracking of COVID-19 variants of concern and interest in the United States . We hypothesize that wastewater surveillance programs provide an effective alternative for detecting emerging variants and assessing COVID-19 incidence , particularly when clinical surveillance is limited . Here , we analyzed SARS - CoV-2 RNA in wastewater from eight locations across Southern Nevada between March 2020 and April 2021 . Trends in SARS - CoV-2 RNA concentrations ( ranging from 4.3 log 10 gc / L to 8.7 log 10 gc / L ) matched trends in confirmed COVID-19 incidence , but wastewater surveillance also highlighted several limitations with the clinical data . Amplicon - based whole genome sequencing ( WGS ) of 86 wastewater samples identified the B.1.1.7 ( Alpha ) and B.1.429 ( Epsilon ) lineages in December 2020 , but clinical sequencing failed to identify the variants until January 2021 , thereby demonstrating that ' pooled ' wastewater samples can sometimes expedite variant detection . Also , by calibrating fecal shedding ( 11.4 log 10 gc / infection ) and wastewater surveillance data to reported seroprevalence , we estimate that~38 % of individuals in Southern Nevada had been infected by SARS - CoV-2 as of April 2021 , which is significantly higher than the 10 % of individuals confirmed through clinical testing . Sewershed - Keywords : SARS - CoV-2 COVID-19 Virus Wastewater Mutation Variant