"Municipal wastewater is a composite biological sample of an entire community with each member of the community inputting biological specimens every day. It is therefore no surprise that wastewater has been tapped as an epidemiological tool to gauge aspects of public health, such as narcotic usage, the reemergence of poliovirus, and infection rates of viral and bacterial diseases. COVID-19 has accelerated the interest in wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) due to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 genes are detected in the feces of many infected individuals. More established epidemiological tools used to track cases in a community have been hindered during the COVID-19 pandemic by diagnostic kit shortages, asymptomatic or mild cases that do not encounter the medical system or delay seeking medical attention, and the lag times between testing and reporting. As a result, public health officials and administrators have had to make critical decisions about opening or closing communities with limited surveillance data. Scientists, engineers, public officials, and the general public, are optimistic that WBE could provide additional data on COVID-19 infections in a community. In fact, the United States Center for Disease Control has established the National Wastewater Surveillance System as a framework for using WBE to inform the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent published studies have reported SARS-CoV-2 detection and quantification in sewage. Based on these reports, numerous entities/organizations across the globe and across scales are moving to implement WBE. It remains to be seen how the data generated from wastewater surveillance should be interpreted or will ultimately be used to make public health decisions. Potential uses include informing on the presence or absence of COVID-19 in a community, similar to polio surveillance; tracking trends over time to project infection trajectory in the coming days; or even using the SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in wastewater to estimate prevalence in a community. The latter application requires a clear understanding of fecal shedding dynamics over the course of the illness, which is not yet established."