Researchers affiliated with Lungfish published a new preprint describing a study in which they ran continuous air sampling alongside an elite soccer team for a month during the 2026 FIFA World Cup™. From June 3 to July 4, 2026, the researchers followed the Canadian men’s national team across five cities hosting the tournament, running InBio Apollo bioaerosol samplers in up to four team-designated rooms per hotel on a twice daily cadence. Of the 174 filters analyzed on-site with the Cepheid Xpert® Xpress assay, 13 carried detectable respiratory virus genetic material: nine SARS-CoV-2, three influenza A, and one influenza B, with no RSV. Detections clustered late in the tournament, influenza A turned up around the time a febrile player was sent home, and SARS-CoV-2 signals coincided with visibly ill hotel staff. The researchers determined that air sampling with point-of-care testing is feasible even in the constantly moving environment of a touring team, and the signals it produces arrive early enough to be useful. Read the preprint on medRxiv.
All of the data and analysis code behind the study are available on GitHub, including the GeneXpert® results, the sequencing data from a subset of samples, and the public wastewater data used for comparison. There is also an interactive version of the manuscript with figures you can explore directly.