(Fast Company) The greatest challenge of containing COVID-19 continues to be that a carrier can be contagious for two days before developing symptoms. It’s impossible to know if you or those around you are sick at any given moment. By the time you do know, one infection could have spread to dozens of people.
But what if there were a way to monitor for the presence of COVID-19 where people go, all day, every day? And not by contact tracing in some smartphone app, but through an actual mechanism that can detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus?
That’s just what Jesse Jokerst, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, is developing. Working under a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, his lab is testing what he calls a “smoke detector” for COVID-19.