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COVID precautions have been lifted nearly everywhere, but that doesn’t mean the virus has gone away. It may be lingering in any given room that’s seen frequent visitors or is host to large crowds. We’ll be living with COVID for the foreseeable future—including any threatening variants that may arise. But a new device built by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis aims to help us manage that new future by providing real-time monitoring of indoor spaces and detecting any traces of the COVID virus in the air in just five minutes.
The new device, described in a paper published in Nature Communications on Monday, is said by its makers to be relatively small and inexpensive to build. It also has the potential to be easily modified to monitor other kinds of aerosolized viruses, such as influenza and RSV.
“It can be effectively utilized in hospitals, ICU wards with symptomatic patients, airports, office spaces, crowded bars, or any crowded indoor environment with poor ventilation and a high risk of virus transmission,” Washington University researchers and study co-authors Joseph Puthussery and Rajan Chakrabarty told The Daily Beast in a joint email. According to the pair, the device could be used for both short duration “spot checks” for COVID, as well as long duration monitoring over an entire day.