This article (“Collection of SARS-CoV-2 Virus from the Air of a Clinic within a University Student Health Care Center and Analyses of the Viral Genomic Sequence”) caught my attention initially because of the air sampling aspect, but upon reading the Abstract I was struck by something else. Here they did air sampling in a …
This is a must-read article for folks thinking about mitigating the risk of COVID-19 indoors. A venerable author list, including many experts on all aspects of indoor ventilation, pathogen transmission, aerosol science, etc. Since it is a review, it’s hard to summarize. Basically they argue that the current status of the science on indoor microbiology …
Yet another wastewater surveillance study for SARS-CoV-2. Seems to be the hot topic these days. This is a great paper by Jordan Peccia and colleagues. They collected wastewater samples over the course of a couple months and saw how well those correlated with testing data and hospital admissions. Not only were the correlations extremely high, …
We are pleased to announce the publication of our manuscript titled “Modeling microbial growth in carpet dust exposed to diurnal variations in relative humidity using the “Time-of-Wetness” framework” in the journal Indoor Air. This work is a culmination of research investigating how changes in relative humidity impact microbial growth in carpet dust. Our related study …
So our collaborators from the Biology of the Built Environment (BioBE) Center at the University of Oregon have been working hard to get their environmental sampling qRT-PCR assays for SARS-CoV-2 up and running. I’m sure we’ll be posting more about their results as they develop. But they are now offering their testing as a service …
We’ve posted recently a few times (here, here, and here) about the idea of doing wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 (and we’ve just submitted a grant on this as well). In those cases the focus is on detecting RNA from the virus and using that to guide community health decisions such as when to end (or …
(h/t to Mark Martin for posting about this on Twitter) A break from COVID-19… Microbes in Spaaaaaaaaaace. (it never gets old). This article entitled “Crewmember microbiome may influence microbial composition of ISS habitable surfaces” is a much needed addition to the literature on the ISS microbiome. Work from our lab an others has examined the …
Wastewater detection for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be a hot topic these days (full disclosure, we recently submitted a grant recently to jump on this same bandwagon). This study “Temporal detection and phylogenetic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater” took place in Montana (USA). This study goes a bit further than the previous one by genome …
So this concept of doing wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 is gaining more and more traction. We posted recently about some work from MIT showing that wastewater titers of the virus are quite a bit higher than might be expected from the clinical data we have. I know some of the folks here at UC Davis …
Given all the media attention this ship got, I think this is a really interesting article; “Transmission routes of Covid-19 virus in the Diamond Princess Cruise ship“. The assumption among many folks is that there might have been airborne transmission between staterooms on the ship, considering the number of people that were infected. This article …
