Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Aerosol Sense Sampler was announced this week (March 24th). It detects a variety of airborne pathogens, including the coronavirus. The Aerosol Sampler is about the size of a toaster oven. It sucks in ambient air and trapped airborne virus particles — if there were any to be found — into a specialized cartridge. Daily removal of the cartridge then delivered to laboratory for analysis. At $4,995, AerosolSense is reputed to be simpler and more accessible and will enable collection of air samples “by almost anyone” according to observers. One device can cover about 2000 sf. Experts field…
Browsing: Containment
The Virus Project will begin production of a White Paper and documentary on reopening schools and keeping them open. Research will focus on the K-12 schools that stayed open during the pandemic. The goal is a multimedia asset that addresses this issue and help schools everywhere reopen. The Virus Project was formed to aggregate the best ideas and thinking to provide a platform for innovators to collaborate and find solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. K-12 schools is an area of significant challenge but with noticeable progress. White Paper and Research Study: K-12 schools. Dealing with COVID-19. This White Paper will…
With many countries, such as England and Germany, choosing to re-impose stringent lockdowns amidst a third wave of coronavirus infections, the incentive for businesses to find alternative ways to continue operating is higher than ever. Given that mask-wearing and social distancing are less viable in winter temperatures, the question of indoor air purification presents itself as an enticing offer for businesses that typically rely on crowded indoor spaces, which carry a high risk for the spread of COVID-19 through aerosolization and direct contact. Many big manufacturers of air purifiers, such as Philips, Molekule and Dyson, have been capitalizing on this trend and marketing their…
Earlier this month, Kontrol Energy’s BioCloud technology received a two million dollar investment from the Ontario government. Kontrol, a Canadian energy company with international collaborators, was founded in 2015, and has made a name for itself through it’s use of technological innovation to address modern problems, such as energy efficiency, air quality and carbon emissions. Kontrol’s new BioCloud technology is a system designed to detect the ambient presence of COVID-19 in indoor air, and marks the company’s first shift to pandemic era solutions. While coronavirus air testing has recently experienced a technological boom, with companies such as eurofins, AssuredBio, and PathogenDx offering their own air testing technologies, the BioCloud system stands out as the sole…
‘The Swiss Cheese Model For Combating Covid-19 Multiple Layers of Pandemic Defense.’ appeared in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal November 14, 2020, Written by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, a social scientist and physician at Yale University who conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. Dr. Christakis is the author of “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live” The Swiss Cheese Model to dealing with the Coronavirus Recent author of a book The Arrow about living with Pandemics. We summarized his article below. …
A newly released study in the academic journal Annals of Internal Medicine casts more doubt on policies that force healthy individuals to wear face coverings. To conduct the study, which ran from early April to early June, scientists at the University of Copenhagen recruited more than 6,000 participants who had tested negative for COVID-19 immediately prior to the experiment. Half the participants were given surgical masks and instructed to wear them outside the home; the other half were instructed to not wear a mask outside the home. Roughly 4,860 participants finished the experiment. 42 people in the mask group, or…
The development of a UVC light technology at Columbia could be breakthrough in curtailing spread of COVID-19 in indoor public places. The technology, developed by Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, uses lamps that emit continuous, low doses of a particular wavelength of ultraviolet light, known as far-UVC, which can kill viruses and bacteria without harming human skin, eyes and other tissues, as is the problem with conventional UV light. It can be safely used in occupied public spaces, and it kills pathogens in the air before people breathe them in. Scientists have known for decades that germicidal UV light…