Since the beginning of 2020, the world has been involved in the "storm" caused by the new crown pneumonia virus, although more and more people have been vaccinated and everyone's awareness of epidemic prevention has improved, but the virus has a variety of transmission routes, and it may also be transmitted through aerosols, so it is still not exempt from the risk of infection.
Image courtesy of: Orient Net
Moreover, once someone is found to be infected, in addition to the need to isolate them and carry out corresponding treatment, a large number of flow adjustments are needed to identify possible infected people and kill the spread of the virus in the cradle. While there are now multiple ways to determine if a person is infected, when and how they are exposed to the virus is more to speculate from the results of the survey.
Photo credit: Xinhua News Agency
So to give people a clearer picture of whether their environment is at risk of infection and to fill gaps in the investigation process, Engineers at Yale University have developed a new wearable device.
The air clip, called the "Fresh Air Clip," is not expensive, and it can be clipped to a person's collar to catch particles of aerosol virus in the surrounding environment. After some time, the wearer removed the clip and sent it to the lab, where the researchers used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis to determine whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 was present on the device.
Image courtesy of Yale Daily News
In multiple tests to determine whether the device could effectively capture airborne virus particles, 62 volunteers wore Fresh Air Clips for up to five days, and 5 of them tested positive, indicating that the 5 volunteers had been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The study found that 4 of the volunteers wearing the 5 air clips were restaurant waiters and 1 was a homeless shelter worker. And the two positive samples collected in restaurants with indoor dining had a higher viral load compared to other samples, suggesting that the wearer had close contact with one or more infected people.
Image from: Phoenix.com
In addition, the researchers also pointed out that the sensitivity of the device is enough to capture exposure events at subinfectious doses (subinfection means that a pathogen infected with a disease has not yet shown signs of the disease, that is, asymptomatic), indicating that Fresh Air Clip can not only measure whether the virus is exposed, but also measure the level of exposure.
It is worth mentioning that researchers also found traces of SARS-CoV-2 in hospital wards that were considered well ventilated, indicating that Fresh Air Clip may have another "hidden skill": testing the effectiveness of ventilation devices in patients' wards.
From the current research results, Fresh Air Clip can be used as one of the ways to determine whether the indoor environment is a high-risk area of virus exposure, helping people to actively determine whether they are likely to be infected with the virus, so that actions such as detection and isolation can be taken quickly to prevent community transmission.
Photo: Hainan Provincial Health Publicity and Education Center
The next important step in the Fresh Air Clip study is to develop a feature that notifies viral exposure in real time, just as some devices can notify the wearer of their exposure to gamma rays or X-rays, the researchers said.
The "storm" caused by the new crown virus does not know how long it will last, and it is naturally the key to quickly report the results in the prevention and control link, but for everyone, it is more important to do a good job of personal protection.
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