As we speak the defending World Series champion Washington Nationals are taking on my favorite team, the New York Yankees, to kick off MLB’s abbreviated 60 game season. But they are doing so short-handed as their best player, young star outfielder Juan “Goat-o” Soto just found out that he tested positive for COVID-19.
That’s a pretty big deal in of itself but this story is much larger than that. Since Soto was asymptomatic he was at practice yesterday where he could have infected other teammates. Those teammates are getting tested before today’s game against the Yankees but those test results won’t be immediately available. Which means that they’ll be playing tonight’s game without knowing who has COVID or not or if anyone could be spreading the disease to other players.
This is an absolute catastrophe waiting to happen. One day into the season and two entire teams, two of the best teams in all of baseball at that, could soon see significant portions of their rosters get infected. Baseball may be instituting expanded playoffs that will now see a record 16 franchises reach October but the Yankees and Nationals will not be among them if their entire rosters need to get shut down one game into the season. Playing the game tonight, or any game in the foreseeable future, before you have test results in your possession is immoral, unconscionable, and downright dangerous.
What Major League Baseball needs, what every segment of our population needs, is a way to obtain test results quicker. Having to wait several days or even a week is entirely too long. By the time you get your results it’s too late to do anything about it. Too late to do contact tracing. Too late to isolate yourself. Too late to seek medical attention. Any testing other than testing that results in immediate feedback is entirely unacceptable.
Thankfully there may be a solution in the works. An innovation that comes to us courtesy of my alma mater Northeastern University!
The News at Northeastern explains:
“As schools, businesses, and other organizations plan their strategies to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, testing people regularly for the coronavirus will be one of the key components in attempts to slow and control new waves of cases.
But current testing technologies can be slow—too slow—for the rapid spread of the virus. A positive test today doesn’t necessarily mean someone is still free of the virus two days later, which is about as long as the test results would take to be delivered if you are in the U.S.
That’s why technology that can perform instant and frequent testing could serve as an important weapon in the fight against a pandemic that has already taken a significant toll on people, markets, and governments around the world.
And it is precisely the technology that Nian Sun, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, is working on.
Sun created a gas sensor for different molecules in the air. It’s a device that can probe the chemistry of airborne pathogens, including the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes COVID-19. And, like a breathalyzer that can give results in real-time, it works within seconds, Sun says.
The device uses electrochemical sensors consisting of a special material imprinted with cavities that are the same shape and size as the crown-like structure of proteins that cover the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Like missing pieces from a puzzle, those proteins (and only those proteins) fit within the cavities of the material. The sensors basically catch those particles from the air. Then, the material reacts with the proteins and sends an electrical signal indicating that the virus is present.”
A breathalyzer for COVID-19? I like the sound of that. Especially when you consider that using our breathe to test for COVID-19 is certaintly a lot easier than some of the other more painful testing methods like shoving a swap up our noses! Hopefully, this technology can scale up quickly and get us all back to doing what we love whether that’s playing baseball or just watching it.
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