[...]recently, CoVs were not assumed to be highly pathogenic in humans (Zaki et al., 2012), but this perception changed after the recent Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV), and the current severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) outbreaks. [...]viable viruses were detected in feces, implicating these as a potential source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by fecal contamination (Wang et al., 2020). SARS-CoV-2 was also recovered from nasal washes, saliva, urine, and feces of infected animals (ferrets) up to 8 days post-infection (Kim et al., 2020). [...]while still poorly understood, the GI symptoms reported from the start of COVID-19 epidemic at least suggest that fecal–oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2 may occur (Yeo et al., 2020). Respiratory droplets are the main human-to-human mechanism of transmission, but fecal shedding with environmental contamination is increasingly seen as having an important role in viral spread (Bhowmick et al., 2020;Donà et al., 2020). [...]the viability of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater has not been proven (Senatore et al., 2021), and further studies are needed to investigate its fate in wastewater (Collivignarelli et al., 2020) and in natural water bodies receiving treated or untreated wastewater (Kumar et al., 2021).
Monitoring SARS-CoV-2 as a Microbiological Risk in Shellfish Aquaculture