 Abstract as clinical testing declines, wastewater monitoring can provide crucial surveillance on the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variant of concerns, VOX, in communities. In this paper we present Quaid, a novel bioinformatics tool for VOC detection based on quasi-unique mutations. The benefits of Quaid are threefold, I, provides up to three-week earlier VOC detection, two, accurate VOC detection, greater than 95% precision on simulated benchmarks, and, three, leverage all mutational signatures, including insertions and deletions. This article was authored by Nikolai Sapoval, Yunchi Liu, Esther Jilu and others.