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 …
This one falls in the category of “yet another problematic thing to think about”. In this article “Considerations for Large Building Water Quality after Extended Stagnation” the authors are not talking about COVID19 per se. They are discussing the hazards associated with stagnant water after building remain closed for a long time because of the …
There is a new preprint of interest to those interested in SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus spreading around the world. Details: Aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 (SARS-CoV-2) compared to SARS-CoV-1 Neeltje van Doremalen, Trenton Bushmaker, Dylan Morris, Myndi Holbrook, Amandine Gamble, Brandi Williamson, Azaibi Tamin, Jennifer Harcourt, Natalie Thornburg, Susan Gerber, Jamie Lloyd-Smith, Emmie de …
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 …
I have been trying to collect information about the new coronavirus and transmission via fomites (objects or materials such as door handles, clothing, phones, etc). Yesterday I posted to Twitter asking for input and got a large collection of useful responses. See these two tweets and the responses to them. I highlight some key responses …