The Sars CoV-2 coronavirus, otherwise known as COVID-19, has been with us for about a year and a half, causing havoc everywhere, and a challenge to the science research community to try to solve this health crisis. A lot has been learned about COVID-19, what has been done to mitigate it, and what needs to happen, hopefully, to prevent another outbreak. On that last point, the Rockefeller Foundation has established the pandemic prevention institute with a group of academic, private, and non-profit organizations to collaborate with each on disease research. And UW-Madison is one of those groups.

So, tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine welcomes Shelby O’Connor from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Shelby has worked with several other labs at UW-Madison on several specific areas of study, one of which she refers to as passive surveillance. This monitors various environments, such as waste water and, more importantly, the air in places like schools and malls. Then, they test to see if the genome of the disease is present. Not only has UW-Madison research helped sequence the COVID-19 virus, they have developed more and more effective and faster testing methods.

Please listen to the audio of the show above to hear more from Shelby on what we’ve learned from COVID-19 and how we can applying what we’ve learned to prevent another pandemic.

Image courtesy: Trnava University from Unsplash