Forget unpleasant swabs: New Covid-19 test analyses your SCREAMS for traces of the virus
- Dutch inventor Peter van Wees has developed a booth for Covid tests
- It is airlocked and people go in and shout or scream at their loudest
- Particles from exhaled air are then analysed based on size to detect Covid
- The test is not yet approved for use or approved by health authorities
Covid swab tests go either up the nose and into the nasal cavity or prod the back of the throat, and both options are uncomfortable and invasive.
There are several emerging methods being developed as alternatives, including saliva tests, urine tests and now, a ‘scream test’.
Dutch inventor Peter van Wees has developed a way of analysing exhaled particles from a person’s breath for signs of the coronavirus.
But to get enough particles and to ensure virus can be detected, the people being tested must scream or sing at the top of their lungs in an airlocked cabin.
Dutch inventor Peter van Wees has developed a way of analysing exhaled particles from a person’s breath for signs of the coronavirus
An industrial air purifier collects all the particles exhaled by the person, which are then analysed for the virus
An industrial air purifier collects all the particles emitted, which are then analysed for the virus.
‘If you have coronavirus and are infectious and yelling and screaming you are spreading tens of thousands of particles which contain coronavirus,’ Van Wees told Reuters.
Van Wees, a serial entrepreneur, set up his booth next to a coronavirus testing centre in Amsterdam to try his invention out on people who have just been tested.
‘It’s always very nice to scream, when nobody can hear you though,’ said Soraya Assoud, 25, who needed proof of a negative coronavirus test for a trip to Spain.
Van Wees, a serial entrepreneur, set up his booth next to a coronavirus testing centre in Amsterdam to try his invention out on people who have just been tested (pictured)
Van Wees says that although lots of small particles from the person’s clothes and breath are detected, an infection shows up as a cluster around the size of the coronavirus. The process takes about three minutes
Van Wees says that although lots of small particles from the person’s clothes and breath are detected, an infection shows up as a cluster around the size of the coronavirus. The process takes about three minutes.
The virus is identified by its size using a nanometre-scale sizing device.
He sees the machine as a potentially useful screening tool at concerts, airports, schools or offices.
Spokesman Geert Westerhuis of the Netherlands’ National Institute for Health (RIVM), which is not involved in the project, said it is looking at an array of testing strategies and would welcome a fast, functioning test that was highly accurate.
But ‘how this apparatus works – we can’t estimate it because we know too little about it,’ he said.
A breath test requiring the participant to blow into a tube was approved last month by health authorities in Amsterdam, but it has not yet been rolled out nationally due to troubles with ‘false negatives’.
Van Wees is working with a private company to marshal evidence for his strategy.
Ms Assoud, on her way to Spain, said either way, the experience in Van Wees’s machine had been pleasant.
‘I think it’s a good way of meditation as well … it’s fun!’