Looking to better understand COVID-19 and where it appears, microbiologists have been taking samples from public spaces, seeking to identify where the virus may reside and how it spreads. In the short term, this can help with determining how long the virus can survive on various surfaces, but it’s the long-term benefits of this sampling that is drawing the most interest, as the results of the studies may help to identify potential points of future flareups.
Says computational biologist Christopher Mason, and member of MetaSUB, which maintains an open source database of the results of this swabbing, “the appetite for molecular monitoring has really increased, because people are now seeing what the cost of its absence looks like.”
Jack Gilbert, at the University of California San Diego, has also applied his expertise in the field to track COVID-19 at a more individual level, examining the shedding of the virus by patients, to determine how much they’re emitting and to where. As to his interest in individual patients, Gilbert says “Our hypothesis is that unique bacteria present in the respiratory tract of a patient might alter the persistence of the virus in the built environment.”
While it’s still early in these research projects, their work, and that of others, may help to both reshape our understanding of COVID-19, and improve our ability to react to and restrict its growth and return.
Source:
https://www.wired.com/story/microbe-mappers-are-tracking-covid-19s-invisible-traces/
