Here’s an article about a superspreader event… which of course falls under the rubric of the microbiology of the built environment, because all these large transmission events happen indoors! “Community Outbreak Investigation of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Among Bus Riders in Eastern China” describes… well like it says in the title. Good evidence for airborne spread here, …
More wastewater surveillance coming out. Not sure about the title on this one since there’s been a number of publications on wastewater detection of SARS-CoV-2 in the US but maybe this title was correct when they submitted this paper “First detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater in North America: A study in Louisiana, USA“. Pretty …
Very nice and cleanly done study here, “Air and Environmental Contamination Caused by COVID-19 Patients: a Multi-Center Study” is a very straightforward look at the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in a healthcare setting… without aerosol generating procedures being part of the pictures. They looked at the air (all negative) and a bunch of surfaces (27% positive …
Here’s the kind of article that we’ve been asking for since March… looking at the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 on various surfaces (including paper money) under various conditions. I was excited when I saw the title and some of the media buzz about this paper. But then I looked a bit deeper. So “The effect of …
Another wastewater study… but looking at the very important question of whether infectious virus can be detected in the waste stream. Most wastewater studies to date have only looked at viral RNA. The not-too-surprising punchline is that infectious virus dies out long before the RNA signal is degraded. This kind of information we be useful …
I took a break from blogging to help start up the mass asymptomatic testing program for SARS-CoV-2 at UC Davis but now I’m working through the backlog of relevant papers to post about. I’ve posted a lot so far about restaurants, hospitals, and wastewater sampling…. but to my knowledge this is the first published description …
This is arguably getting a bit outside the built environment mandate and more into epidemiology and disease transmission, but I thought this was an interesting paper detailing a particular outbreak in a meat processing facility. “Investigation of a superspreading event preceding the largest meat processing plant-related SARS-Coronavirus 2 outbreak in Germany“. What I particularly like …
A review article this time, “An Overview on the Role of Relative Humidity in Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Indoor Environments“. It’s pretty much all there in the title… they looked at the state of current research and tried to summarize it here, specifically with an eye towards actionable choices for people managing buildings. Abstract …
A short article here from our prolific collaborators at the University of Oregon, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Environmental Contamination and Childbirth”. Basically they are looking here at the risk of the spreading of the virus during childbirth… and show that an asymptomatic carrier results in environmental contamination. No Abstract since it’s a …
I expect to see more and more of this kind of article moving forward. Moving from “here’s the virus in buildings” to “here’s an approach for dealing with it. In this article, “Intermittent occupancy combined with ventilation: An efficient strategy for the reduction of airborne transmission indoors” the authors look at the combination of ventilation …
