Corrigendum to: “COVID-19 monitoring with sparse sampling of sewered and non-sewered wastewater in urban and rural communities” [iScience, Volume 26, Issue 7 (2023) 107019]

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.107019

This Corrigendum relates to the above article.

Post-publication, an investigation identified a concern around the authenticity of the following figure panels:

In Supplemental Figure S3, the left-column panels A, D, G, J, and M (SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater collected from different facilities in Nakhon Pathom, Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Samut Prakan, and Samut Sakhon, respectively) appear to display the same dataset, although they are described as representing five different provinces.

The authors were requested to provide comment on these concerns, as well as the raw data to aid investigation, and have clarified that the duplication of panels A, D, G, J, and M resulted from an error in the plotting code introduced during figure preparation, which caused the same dataset to be displayed in all five panels. The underlying source data for the five provinces are distinct, and the error affected only the rendered figure; it did not affect the data, analyses, results, or conclusions presented in the article. Regarding the right-column panels C, F, I, L, and O, the authors clarified that each panel is plotted from distinct, province-specific data, and that the apparent similarity reflects the genuinely similar relative facility-type compositions across these adjacent provinces in the greater Bangkok metropolitan region. The authors have provided the correct figures as below.

Figure S3. SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in wastewater collected from different facilities, infection incidences based on SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations, and relative abundance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration in wastewater collected from different facilities. The ribbons show the standard deviation of 1000 bootstrap replicates. Grey areas highlight the period during a nationwide ban on large events to ease lockdown (26-Dec-20 to 29-Jan-21, and 17-Apr-21 to 01-Sep-21). The black labels show the super-spreading events, and the red labels are the starting of interventions. (a-c) Nakhon Pathom, (d-f) Nonthaburi, (g-i) Pathum Thani, (j-l) Samut Prakan, (m-o) Samut Sakhon (Corrected)

The authors apologise for this oversight. The journal apologises that the oversight was not identified prior to publication.