Fig. 1: A pathogen removal vs. productivity trade-off exists in virus filtration techniques widely used in water treatment illustrating the challenge with virus removal.

a The permeability vs. virus retention efficiency of widely used filtration technologies shows that a trade-off exists between the pathogen removal and permeability due to the dependence on size-exclusion. The tabulated data with references is available in Supplementary Table 4. b The operational energy requirement of filtration techniques and total energy requirement of disinfection techniques (except for chlorination) considering a combination of operational energy and embedded chemical energy is comparable. This indicates that filtration techniques can potentially achieve similar performance as disinfection, specifically if the virus removal efficiency can be increased without incurring substantial additional operational energy costs. A detailed summary of the literature survey and energy requirement values used can be found in Supplementary Table 5 and Supplementary Note 2.