Re: [DIYbio] DIY COVID-19 PCR test

Absolutely disagree on the relative risk of surface swabbing. Presumably if individuals are passing through the areas that they are swabbing they are picking up these pathogens on their hands anyway. The additional risk of swabbing is negligible. Back in the lab, the samples have to be presumed to to be infectious, but no amplification of the entire virus is occurring. The PCR step is amplifying only a portion of the envelope. Slight risk of aerosolizing the particles, but nowhere near the risk of an individual who is infected aerosolizing particles just by breathing, let alone coughing.

On Saturday, 29 February 2020 12:44:57 UTC-8, Jonathan Cline wrote:

Smartwatch app to periodically measure body temperature and sync to
the cloud with location data for crowdsourcing potential outbreaks
would be more relevant I would assume.  WHO should already have
developed such an app but they're obviously behind the times.  The
drawback being that smartwatch temperature sensors have improper reads
sometimes.

Developing a test kit for swabbing potentially contaminated surfaces
is not much safer than swabbing potential patients themselves.

Benefits of a face mask are nebulous. They certainly don't protect
against a virus and maybe only marginally protect others when an
infected person wears one.

More useful could be a (pressure) directed ozone generator to
sterilize public surfaces, portable size, with a rechargeable battery
pack.



On 2/29/20, Tito <titoja...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> Perhaps the biggest outcome is that everyone decides *not* to work on this
> at a PCR level and each lab does a blog post on it. Or spend energies
> elsewhere like working on the genome virtually, software to map spread of
> the virus



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