#COVID19 Preprint Journal Club: “Toilets dominate environmental detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus in a hospital”

Another short #COVID19 Preprint with relevance to the built environment came out yesterday.  This one from a hospital in Nanjing, China where they collected 107 samples from the air and various surfaces.  Most of those were negative (RT qPCR as usual) but most of the positives were found in the bathroom.   Abstract below:   Abstract …

Short study suggesting aerosol transmission of #COVID19 via air-conditioning

Just saw this pre-print “COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China, 2020“.  Very short, very to the point.   Evidence that droplet transmission happened in this particular outbreak via the ventilation within a building.  Abstract below:   During January 26–February 10, 2020, an outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease in an air-conditioned restaurant …

#COVID19 Journal club at #microBEnet. SARS-CoV-2 in Hospital Rooms of Infected Patients

Another quick COVID19 Journal club in the Built Environment.  This study (“Detection of Air and Surface Contamination by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Hospital Rooms of Infected Patients”  combined air and surface sampling to look at the distribution of the virus in a healthcare setting with infected patients.  This is another RNA-based …

A #COVID19 in the Built Environment preprint: shedding in a hospital

A preprint came out yesterday entitled “Transmission Potential of SARS-CoV-2 in Viral Shedding Observed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center“.  They looked at actual virus shed by patients in a healthcare setting (as opposed to artificial virus aerosols).  They found widespread contamination of surfaces and objects in the room… but all of the detection …

Detection of viral RNA, detection of infectious virus, and transmission risk are not interchangeable #COVID19

A short rant, precipitated by a Letter to JAMA that I was reading today. Detection of viral RNA DOES NOT EQUAL detection of infectious virus particles which DOES NOT EQUAL transmission risk.   Are all these things related? Of course.  Are they the same thing?  NO. This was prominent in the news recently with the finding …

Short, valuable preprint “Stability of SARS-CoV-2 in different environmental conditions”

This is a super-short preprint… just a letter and a few tables but contains some really useful information.  The authors looked at the viability (not just viral RNA!) of SARS-CoV-2 under different conditions including various surfaces, temperatures, and with various disinfectants. Example good news:  The virus is disinfected very readily Example bad news:  They detected …

Citizen Science Project on the Tomato Seed Microbiome

(cross posted to the UCD Microbiome SRP blog) What do you get when you combine UC Davis alumni, tomato seeds, and citizen science?   That would be Project GASP (“Germ”-ination Alumni Science Project).  I didn’t come up with the name, I swear.   This project, sponsored and paid for by the College of Biological Sciences at UC …

The #microbenet and BioBE Center stab at a review of COVID-19 and the Built Environment

(updated 4/7/20 with revised preprint and publication information) So late last week, the folks at the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon contacted us wanting to write a review of built environment considerations related to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.  We worked furiously on it for a couple of days and through the …

Story behind the paper: RtxA type 1 secretion system and other virulence factors in Legionella

So this work is a spinoff of a big project that we were involved in (but almost all of the work was done by Amy Pruden’s lab at Virginia Tech).  In the larger project, they examined the genomes of over 100 clinical isolates of Legionella pneumophila, as well as 10 clinical isolates from patients during …