ABSTRACT
The hospitality industry (also called HoReCa in some European countries) is one of the most vulnerable sectors in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also one of the sectors of greatest economic relevance for many of the countries with strong reliance on tourism. Despite the fact that the scientific community has focused on the development of solutions that allow reducing the impact of the pandemic, its implementation in the hospitality industry has been so far residual. In this work, we present a technological solution that allows to detect and quantify variables related to the risk of contagion of airborne diseases (e.g., COVID-19) through the monitoring of environmental variables (e.g., CO2, CO 2 -eq, suspended particulate matter, temperature, humidity, etc.). The acquired data is sent following the FIWARE NGSI "IndoorEnvironmentObserved” standard and then displayed through a Grafana interface, where real-time contagion risk indicators can be seen. The presented system has been developed within the HORECoV-21 project, where additional features such as automatic people counting, indoor social distance control, and virus detection systems in wastewater improve the quality of contagion risk predictions. Pilot tests have been carried out, which show that the proposed solution can reduce the risk of contagion in the hospitality industry and the like, through graphs, visual indicators and flags that warn whenever it is necessary to take active measures (e.g., activating ventilation) thus increasing health safety in establishments and reducing the impact of the pandemic without incurring a high cost for businesses. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Since the first report in Wuhan (China) in 2019, the SARS-CoV 2 virus has spread throughout the world, with a significant impact in public health. To contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the WHO has encouraged the development of rapid, simple, sensitive and specific tests that complement the gold standard RT-qPCR. Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) has shown a good yield to detect SARS-CoV2 in different fluids. Objective: To validate the colorimetric RT-LAMP technique using two sets of oligonucleotides aimed at identifying the N gene of SARS-CoV-2 in 117 nasopharyngeal swab samples, previously confirmed by RT-qPCR using the Charite/Berlin protocol. Material and methods: 153 nasopharyngeal swab samples from individuals with suspected Covid-19 were subjected to qRT-PCR and RT-LAMP using a commercial colorimetric kit (NEB, Germany). RT-LAMP was run using both extracted RNA samples and raw samples without prior RNA extraction, and the result was assessed by a simple color change in the reaction. Results: RT-LAMP sensibility and specificity for gen N SARS-CoV-2 detection using one primers set previosly reported got values 0.97 (0.85, 1.00) and 0.81 (0.65, 0.92) respectively, for CI 95%. The other set primer used in this paper also reported previosly had 0.96 (0.78,1.00) sensibility and 0.77 (0.55,0.92) specificity to RT-LAMP. Without RNA extraction we found sensibility value of 0.95 (0.74, 1.00) and specificity 0.88 (0.64, 0.99). Conclusion: Taking together, the obtained results show RT-LAMP technique could be considered a rapid diagnostic test, easy to perform, free of sophisticated equipment, sensitive and specific to diagnose SARS-CoV-2 in nasopharyngeal swabs with and without prior RNA extraction, which that allows scaling its portability to places with scarce sources of resources.