Hi @Uncle_Gabby, I’m sorry to say I don’t have info in this regard.
If memory serves, you work as a first responder. Thanks for your service, and good luck out there.
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The virus is supposed to stay alive for 2-3 days on smooth surfaces, and shorter on non-smooth surfaces, so if you just put it in a bag or something for a couple days it should decontaminate itself. I have two masks and that’s what I’m doing.
Yes, I’m a Firefighter. We also respond to EMS calls. If you happen to come across anything please let me know. I have found a lot of good info on various forums, basically being shared by the men and women in the trenches, so to speak. But to get the command staff to act you need something in writing from some recognized authority.
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Thanks for everything you do at all times, but especially now my man.
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Who me? Shit, I love my job so much, getting a paycheck feels like I pulled a scam.
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Putting this here since it’s a bit more technical:
There’s a theory running among researchers here about how impredictable this virus might be.
There’s usually a long timeframe in which viruses adapt by decreasing their mortality rate, the virus needs its host to live, so it tends to get less and less deadly over time while finding “a balance” to survive.
This process WAS mediated by the fact that aggressive viruses, until a couple decades ago, didn’t get the chance to spread quickly due to lack of globalization and restricted mobility. The Spanish flu for example took years to spread all over the world, and in the meantime the virus adapted by becoming less aggressive.
If Covid happened, say, a thousand years ago, it would have been confined to a couple villages in China for years probably, while adapting, then it would have spread slowly over the country and then to other countries, it wouldn’t be different from many generic forms of flu.
But since (I’ll quote the words of the researchers) “our technology progresses faster than how our biology can adapt”, this virus managed to spread globally in an extremely short time, we’ll never know the exact timing but it’s realistic that it was around outside of China in December, and actually a simple 8-hours fly from China to [insert other country] could have been enough to trigger the pandemy, given how our society is connected on a global level.
This means that this virus has affected a huge amount of population in an extremely short time, without progressively adapting to become less aggressive, which makes it very unpredictable on possible future adaptations.
It’s basically like a teenager winning the lottery.
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This is a very interesting theory…and certainly fits in with the behavior of viruses.
I’m so glad you said this. I pretty much said the same in the other thread a few weeks ago and there were a couple of posters that kept arguing that I was wrong and that surgical masks were worth wearing for the general population, plus linking bad-designed studies to ““disprove”” my point.
I hope @Californiagrown sees this.
Hey, not to restart this argument but remember you did link a study that said that surgical masks were up to 80% effective. Even if it’s 40% it’s something. I don’t think 99% of people could properly fit themselves for an N95 mask, so that wouldn’t be much better either.
The fact is that there isn’t much you can do to protect yourself, but something is better than nothing.
As for the shortage of masks, well I work for a nursing home so if I were to get infected but not yet have symptoms then I could potentially infect a whole bunch of old, sick people who are at the highest risk. If they can get masks production up then I think it would be a good idea to get people working in healthcare to wear them when they go out in public to limit the spread. Also people working in grocery stores and pharmacies, I only saw one Wal-Mart employee wearing a mask. Those people are some of the most likely to get infected, and will also spread it to a lot of people.
We might have had a fundamental misunderstanding. I never linked that study. The other guy linked it as a counterpoint to my argument, and I merely exposed the problems with that study. I surely didn’t bring it up as support to my point.
Let’s not go back through that, but I think we can agree that limited protection is better than none. Bullet proof vests aren’t 100% effective but cops still wear them, right?
The problem is that they don’t offer the kind of protection people think they do.
More and more authorities here are officially discouraging usage of those masks because by wearing them unwarrantedly, people are taking them away from those that are in a position to benefit from them, or straight up need them (think hospitals).
The main problem is the shortage, and hopefully that won’t last for long.
There is only so much you can do anyway. Go shopping and wash your hands when you come home, but are you going to wash every item that you bought? You can’t. You have to minimize the risks, but there is no way to 100% eliminate them.
Another dangerous thought is someone thinking they are protected by the mask or that the virus is taken care of by the mask. We don’t want people to engage in risky behavior because they think if people have masks it’s free reign and no one is vulnerable.
Ignorance isn’t in short supply or anything.
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I feel silly for not having mentioned this first. You’re absolutely right.
Fellas.
Please.
This thread was started by our resident PhD epidemiologist to share expert level insight.
Our T-Nation role model and totally jacked @EyeDentist came out of posting retirement to chime in with decades of medical practice behind his words.
@Aragorn does some kind of science stuff too, or possibly cooks meth. Maybe both. My sources are uncertain.
It would be rad if we kept the substance of this thread to posts from people who were experts in the relevant subject matter. We’ve got plenty of threads for Coronavirus layman talk, and I’ll be happy to fire back and forth over there.
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*malpractice
ROFL. I am not Heisenberg. It would probably be more financially rewarding if I were though. Relevant information on the coronavirus at the end of the post.
My background
FWIW among anonymous interwebz people, I can fully corroborate AG’s real life cred posted at the beginning of the thread, as I’ve seen his actual CV. He works at a big time school of medicine. He’s also a kickass guy.
I’ve got an advanced degree in biochemistry and molecular biophysics (Financial Crisis years), and have ~10 years combined experience in both basic research and more applied work. Published in the fields of structural biochemistry, pharmacology (including animal sciences), nanomedicine. A fundamental part of my early grad school research helped launch a biotech company and my best friend (also a “wet” scientist) is a VP there. I cut my teeth on peptide chemistry with a focus on biologically based drug delivery methods.
I don’t have anywhere near as many publications as AG–who is a complete BAMF. Part of that is due to the fact that I own my own business and consult on scientific matters on the side now. Although it would be presumptuous to suppose I’d match AG’s current level.
On thread topic: Coronavirus basics
Most people have seen illustrations of the coronavirus “spiky ball” on news stories. Those spikes are what the virus uses to infiltrate cells. The surface of the sphere is made of lipids, a little like your cell membranes, and this is what makes it vulnerable to the good ol’ soap and water approach (soap breaks up the lipid membrane).
The spike protein has been mapped at the atomic level (Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation - PubMed), and is currently a target for vaccine development. A number of stateside clinical trials are ongoing (aside from the numerous Chinese ones, which may or may not be reliable and aren’t reported to us). This happened in record time by orders of magnitude–thankfully.
Structurally the current coronavirus shares ~80% of its sequence with the original SARS virus. The current hypothesis is that it jumped from bats after mutation, as the closest known relative is ~96% identical and found in bats (although we don’t know the actual “jump” event, it’s possible there was an intermediate, particularly as domestic companion animals can contract the virus). This doesn’t directly help us, but it does give us (hopefully) an understanding of its reservoir and origin–both the original SARS and MERS have bat reservoirs. It targets the ACE2 receptor as previously mentioned in the Cell study I shared in the other thread, and with a significantly higher affinity, which accounts for its increased infectiousness.
Whereas most coronaviruses attack tend to attack either the upper or lower respiratory tracts, this attacks both, probably accounting for the increased level of gnarly side effects like pneumonia, ventilation requirment, and death. As a general rule of thumb, upper respiratory tract viruses are easier to spread but less serious while lower respiratory tract viruses (think MERS) are much harder to spread but more serious (MERS has ~ 35% CFR). Thus, this seems to combine aspects of the worst of both worlds. Thankfully, not a ton of fatality.
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Great info, @Aragorn.
Back on thread topic, I’ll try to add some “what are we doing about this?” from the medical community perspective (not just “shut down society” but the clinical trials we’re standing up in a hurry in search for effective treatments as well as figuring out the safest way to manage the patients through their disease course).
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Hopefully I’m not too far off topic with my last post. I’m not as useful from a medical community standpoint, but I’ll contribute where I can. I’m mostly just a basic research monkey.
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