I clicked on the Twitter link thinking it was gonna be you doing a backflip or something
Arnold,
Thank you for sharing your many insights about the Covid-19 situation, and for sharing links to helpful other sources. Many of us (your readers) hope that you will continue to do so.
Coughs, Hands, and Face
Hand washing is the most effective tool to protect against COVID-19. Flying Cough Droplets are a concern, that is the point of the Physical Distancing 6ft rule, but bringing your unclean Hands up to your Face is the most common way to catch Respiratory Infections. The flipside is, if you have mild symptoms, touching your Face with your Hands and not first washing/sanitizing your Hands before touching an object or surface, is a pretty good way to spread the infection. Logically, not as effective a vector as a Cough or Sneeze that projects droplets with extremely high concentrations of virus, but enough to be worrisome.
I am not an expert, but I’m assuming that someone who trains medical professionals in the use of PPE equipment would either be horrified or very amused with Bret Weinstein’s Bandana Trick because he doesn’t properly sanitize his hands before and after touching his Face with his Hands. This is “gross negligence” as they call the rational case against casual use of face masks for the very reason Weinstein demonstrates. Surgical vs N95 is not the issue; understanding how to properly use Personal Protection Equipment is.
Along these same lines, earlier in the Dark Horse Podcast, Heather Heying makes a comment about fecal transmission and said something like [paraphrasing]: “as long as you don’t lick anybody’s butt”. This is another example of not understanding the importance of the Hands and Face in the spread of infectious disease. As anyone familiar with Hep A outbreaks knows, they are normally caused by food service workers who don’t properly wash their hands after using the toilet. Washing your Hands if you have Hep A is the way to protect your friends, family, and customers.
Thanks for this. Certainly interesting, a couple of minor factual errors, but nothing that detracted from the substance.
It was interesting to hear their experience with what may have been an infection a while back. I went through something similar myself, maybe at a similar time – but I keep reading (reliable) reports on the internet of people saying similar stuff. All largely before the virus was supposed to be here.
I live in Britain in fact so I’m certainly going to get one of the serology tests if they become available commercially, over-the-counter. Just to know really.
I think their point about bandanas/scarves is excellent. No they’re not as effective as the clinical ones, but they will have some protective effect.
I’d like to learn more about the effectiveness of different detergents, etc. with hand-washing and hair,body as well, but also disinfection materials and protocols in retail environments, and public transport and so on. Also, the temperature scanners at points of entry – useful, or mere healthcare theatre? And finally, we’ll ground aircraft won’t we in the immediate aftermath of a terrorism incident. Is there something to be said for this approach for these disease outbreaks? What with all of those Chinese itinerant workers in the textile/garment industry in Italy ( or is that an internet myth?).
They give the virus a motivation, life for the future. But they also have to give the anti-bodies the same motivation to balance the system.
The anti-bodies are killing us because the immune response seems to be very potent, targeted and effective, we actually over react. The EM docs usually have to repress the immune system to get fever down. The high death rates, that means the anti-bodies intend to eliminate this virus even if it kills us.
So, groups of infect people become increasingly rare, quickly. It is the quickly that scares us, as that is still a lot of deaths toward an equilibrium, and it is happening fast, we reject the virus as much as it is contagious, a lot. The high rate of contagion and the strength of the anti-bodies l;eaves us very soon in a situation where only a tiny proportion of neighborhoods suffer an outbreak at any given season, one out of forty. The virus pack will appear to move from neighborhood to neighborhood, on a seasonal basis. My claim being based on incubation time vs immune time.
The subject keeps coming up and I keep working a model of virus vs anti-body.
The hoist can be of two states, Having anti-bodies that die in a year. The the host has an infection which dies in two weeks. But the virus must coexist with the anti-bodies, and everyone has seen the disease at equilibrium. There is no host state which has virus and no anti-body. Now there is be now is not equilibrium as the authors noted.
There is a finite and significant probability of neighborhoods having no virus under these statistics. (fermion vs boson stats is what I think happens). Regardless of current death rate, the long term outlook is 40 virus free neighborhoods per one outbreak. I back of the enveloped it, however. I is the same logistic statistics we get when we specify never two clerks at the same counter, but two customers is OK. There will be times when the store is sparse and all the clerks on other chores. In this case, customers are anti-bodies and that queue outnumbers the virus by 30 to 1 and the virus cannot keep all the counters busy leaving gaps in coverage, immunity zones.
Cutting remission times helps a lot, changes the ratio of anti-bodies to virus significantly.
I finished watching this podcast this morning. The story about Heather Possibly Contracting COVID-19 in L.A. is the best part of the podcast. I think this story is indicative of how the chain of Community transmission of COVID-19 starts and stops. Heather was in Los Angeles on Feb 6-11 and had a sudden onset of coughing at home on the night of her return. She and Bret spent the first night in their bedroom together but she felt much worse in the morning and she effectively self-isolated from the rest of the family. One of their sons got sick the following day (2 day incubation) but neither Bret nor their second son got sick. The illness “flattened” them and Bret was debating whether to take the sick son to hospital even though they never suspected they had COVID-19. Heather felt much better exactly 4 days later and decided to go out to a pre-scheduled dinner with friends but she had a coughing fit while at the restaurant table and had to run outside.
If a public health unit performed Contact Tracing, Bret, their friends, and any diners/staff that Heather came in close contact with, would have been ordered to self-isolate for 14 days and a notice would have been issued for everyone else that attended the restaurant and told to Self-Monitor but their risk of infection is low. The sick son’s symptoms stopped after 4 days.
Heather came very close to becoming a super spreader. The difference was probably proper cough management (cough into your sleeve rather than your hand) and good hand hygiene. If she coughed into her hand immediately before running out the door, anyone that subsequently opened that same door would have had high concentrations of her flu-like virus on their hands. Maybe her viral load was already low after 4 days.
Perhaps what we are missing is reverse exponential thinking. When you see a blob growing so large that it consumes an entire building you assume magic growth instead of stepping backwards and seeing Kling’s Petri Dish experiment as the starting point.
I clicked on the Twitter link thinking it was gonna be you doing a backflip or something
Arnold,
Thank you for sharing your many insights about the Covid-19 situation, and for sharing links to helpful other sources. Many of us (your readers) hope that you will continue to do so.
Coughs, Hands, and Face
Hand washing is the most effective tool to protect against COVID-19. Flying Cough Droplets are a concern, that is the point of the Physical Distancing 6ft rule, but bringing your unclean Hands up to your Face is the most common way to catch Respiratory Infections. The flipside is, if you have mild symptoms, touching your Face with your Hands and not first washing/sanitizing your Hands before touching an object or surface, is a pretty good way to spread the infection. Logically, not as effective a vector as a Cough or Sneeze that projects droplets with extremely high concentrations of virus, but enough to be worrisome.
I am not an expert, but I’m assuming that someone who trains medical professionals in the use of PPE equipment would either be horrified or very amused with Bret Weinstein’s Bandana Trick because he doesn’t properly sanitize his hands before and after touching his Face with his Hands. This is “gross negligence” as they call the rational case against casual use of face masks for the very reason Weinstein demonstrates. Surgical vs N95 is not the issue; understanding how to properly use Personal Protection Equipment is.
Along these same lines, earlier in the Dark Horse Podcast, Heather Heying makes a comment about fecal transmission and said something like [paraphrasing]: “as long as you don’t lick anybody’s butt”. This is another example of not understanding the importance of the Hands and Face in the spread of infectious disease. As anyone familiar with Hep A outbreaks knows, they are normally caused by food service workers who don’t properly wash their hands after using the toilet. Washing your Hands if you have Hep A is the way to protect your friends, family, and customers.
Thanks for this. Certainly interesting, a couple of minor factual errors, but nothing that detracted from the substance.
It was interesting to hear their experience with what may have been an infection a while back. I went through something similar myself, maybe at a similar time – but I keep reading (reliable) reports on the internet of people saying similar stuff. All largely before the virus was supposed to be here.
I live in Britain in fact so I’m certainly going to get one of the serology tests if they become available commercially, over-the-counter. Just to know really.
I think their point about bandanas/scarves is excellent. No they’re not as effective as the clinical ones, but they will have some protective effect.
I’d like to learn more about the effectiveness of different detergents, etc. with hand-washing and hair,body as well, but also disinfection materials and protocols in retail environments, and public transport and so on. Also, the temperature scanners at points of entry – useful, or mere healthcare theatre? And finally, we’ll ground aircraft won’t we in the immediate aftermath of a terrorism incident. Is there something to be said for this approach for these disease outbreaks? What with all of those Chinese itinerant workers in the textile/garment industry in Italy ( or is that an internet myth?).
They give the virus a motivation, life for the future. But they also have to give the anti-bodies the same motivation to balance the system.
The anti-bodies are killing us because the immune response seems to be very potent, targeted and effective, we actually over react. The EM docs usually have to repress the immune system to get fever down. The high death rates, that means the anti-bodies intend to eliminate this virus even if it kills us.
So, groups of infect people become increasingly rare, quickly. It is the quickly that scares us, as that is still a lot of deaths toward an equilibrium, and it is happening fast, we reject the virus as much as it is contagious, a lot. The high rate of contagion and the strength of the anti-bodies l;eaves us very soon in a situation where only a tiny proportion of neighborhoods suffer an outbreak at any given season, one out of forty. The virus pack will appear to move from neighborhood to neighborhood, on a seasonal basis. My claim being based on incubation time vs immune time.
The subject keeps coming up and I keep working a model of virus vs anti-body.
The hoist can be of two states, Having anti-bodies that die in a year. The the host has an infection which dies in two weeks. But the virus must coexist with the anti-bodies, and everyone has seen the disease at equilibrium. There is no host state which has virus and no anti-body. Now there is be now is not equilibrium as the authors noted.
There is a finite and significant probability of neighborhoods having no virus under these statistics. (fermion vs boson stats is what I think happens). Regardless of current death rate, the long term outlook is 40 virus free neighborhoods per one outbreak. I back of the enveloped it, however. I is the same logistic statistics we get when we specify never two clerks at the same counter, but two customers is OK. There will be times when the store is sparse and all the clerks on other chores. In this case, customers are anti-bodies and that queue outnumbers the virus by 30 to 1 and the virus cannot keep all the counters busy leaving gaps in coverage, immunity zones.
Cutting remission times helps a lot, changes the ratio of anti-bodies to virus significantly.
Wash Your Hands To Protect Yourself Against COVID-19 [YouTube Mar 11]
Dr. Eileen de Villa
Toronto’s medical officer of health
I finished watching this podcast this morning. The story about Heather Possibly Contracting COVID-19 in L.A. is the best part of the podcast. I think this story is indicative of how the chain of Community transmission of COVID-19 starts and stops. Heather was in Los Angeles on Feb 6-11 and had a sudden onset of coughing at home on the night of her return. She and Bret spent the first night in their bedroom together but she felt much worse in the morning and she effectively self-isolated from the rest of the family. One of their sons got sick the following day (2 day incubation) but neither Bret nor their second son got sick. The illness “flattened” them and Bret was debating whether to take the sick son to hospital even though they never suspected they had COVID-19. Heather felt much better exactly 4 days later and decided to go out to a pre-scheduled dinner with friends but she had a coughing fit while at the restaurant table and had to run outside.
If a public health unit performed Contact Tracing, Bret, their friends, and any diners/staff that Heather came in close contact with, would have been ordered to self-isolate for 14 days and a notice would have been issued for everyone else that attended the restaurant and told to Self-Monitor but their risk of infection is low. The sick son’s symptoms stopped after 4 days.
Heather came very close to becoming a super spreader. The difference was probably proper cough management (cough into your sleeve rather than your hand) and good hand hygiene. If she coughed into her hand immediately before running out the door, anyone that subsequently opened that same door would have had high concentrations of her flu-like virus on their hands. Maybe her viral load was already low after 4 days.
Perhaps what we are missing is reverse exponential thinking. When you see a blob growing so large that it consumes an entire building you assume magic growth instead of stepping backwards and seeing Kling’s Petri Dish experiment as the starting point.