Innovations

How Taiwan used simple tech to help contain Covid-19 The low-tech approach that helped Taiwan efficiently fight off coronavirus. BBC News

...

A decade ago, when the firefighter John Burke earned his master’s degree in health care emergency management, he wrote his thesis on pandemic planning. So when the coronavirus hit last spring, Mr. Burke, now the fire chief in Sandwich, Mass., was ready.

“I had my playbook ready to go,” Mr. Burke said.

Testing for the virus was a top priority, so he connected with a private laboratory to ensure that his firefighters, who were transporting coronavirus patients to hospitals, could be regularly tested.

And then he heard that Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company that makes laboratory equipment and materials, was beta testing an air sampler that could help him detect airborne coronavirus particles.

By December, he had installed one in a fire station hallway. The device, about the size of a toaster oven, sucked in ambient air and trapped airborne virus particles — if there were any to be found — in a specialized cartridge. Each afternoon, an employee would remove the cartridge and walk it to the UPS drop box across the street, sending it off for laboratory analysis.

Homeland Security Newswire - July 29, 2011

Keri Ryan, University of Nevada, Reno civil engineering professor and lead researcher for the base isolation tests this summer at the Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center in Miki, Hyogo, Japan, sits at the outdoor portion of the University of Nevada Reno large structures earthquake engineering lab where they conduct world-renowned bridge research. Photo by Mike Wolterbeek, University of Nevada, Reno.

Landmark earthquake engineering tests this summer in Japan could open the door for earthquake-proofing technology applied to hospitals, nuclear power plants, and emergency-response facilities to be more common in the United States, and confirm the capabilities for the technology used in Japan and the rest of the world

Landmark earthquake engineering tests this summer in Japan by the University of Nevada, Reno could open the door for earthquake-proofing technology applied to hospitals, nuclear power plants, and emergency-response facilities to be more common in the United States, and confirm the capabilities for the technology used in Japan and the rest of the world.