Hybrid Capture-Based Sequencing Demonstrates Superior Public Health potential for post-COVID Wastewater Surveillance

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has proven to be a scalable and cost-effective strategy for monitoring infectious diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the post-COVID era, however, current WBE practices based on reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) and targeted next-generation sequencing (tNGS) face limitations in throughput and pathogen breadth, posing challenges for early detection of emerging public health threats. Here, we apply hybrid capture-based sequencing for longitudinal wastewater surveillance in two Chinese cities and systematically evaluate its utility through multi-technology and geospatial comparisons.