C19 Topics
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Encouraging news regarding a vaccine:
"Trials involving 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus.
The findings are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way."
www.bbc.com
"Trials involving 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus.
The findings are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way."
Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response
Study shows the vaccine is safe, but it is still too soon to know if it can stop people from being infected.
www.bbc.com
Can't. He's on the cover of the current digital issue of InStyle magazine. Plus, he's throwing out the first pitch in Washington for the season opener on Thursday..
I have a serious question though. Let's say a person is wearing a m95 mask and is protected significantly from the virus. He walks into a room that has a covid positive person in it. The covid positive person coughs or sneezes in the proximity of the person wearing the mask. The droplets land on parts of his face, neck and forehead. Afterwards, the person leaves the room and takes off his mask. Could the droplets that landed on his face, neck, and forehead eventually be inhaled after they dry?
Short answer is, possibly, but there's not a lot of evidence for that with coronavirus or rhinovirus. Instead of being merely in the proximity, the person sprays you in the face with a cough or sneeze, where you feel the wetness, A), hope you're wearing glasses (or googles or a face shield) and B), you should probably wash your face soonest. The evidence seems to show (key word is seems) that when the droplets from the cough or sneeze that landed on your skin has enough mucous left behind that it acts like sort of a glue that keeps the virus where it landed, and by the time the mucous breaks down to where you might inhale the virus, it's either dead or in such a small quantity as to not matter.
If you pick up coronavirus on your hands from another surface, and then touch your face, it can shed almost immediately (unless you have a greasy, oily face) to where you can inhale it. That's a bigger concern. Of course, if you touch your eyes, nose or mouth with tainted fingers, it's an immediate path into your mucous membranes and your lungs.
Most of the news coverage has been about transmission through large water droplets, coughs and sneezes, but we've known for decades that respiratory viruses like coronavirus and rhinovirus can spread through just normal talking and breathing. So it's more a matter of proximity and time. We don't know the minimum COVID-19 dose you need to become infected, but we know that dose matters, and the bigger the dose the worse it is, with smaller doses not resulting in infection. It's not like some viruses where all it takes is just one of them little buggers to get you (TB, Typhoid, Ebola, etc.). WIth coronavirus it takes hundreds of thousands, or millions. We just don't know how many.
The key to not getting it isn't to isolate yourself in a Bio Level 4 HAZMAT suit all the time, but rather to constantly mitigate and reduce dose exposure.
I've spent a lot of time in doctor's offices over the last few weeks, and 2 doctors and at least 3 nurses have all said the same things: they aren't concerned with the virus on the skin, clothing or hair, but are more concerned about keeping their hands clean so as to not transfer the virus to their eyes, nose or mouth. And they wear a mask and keep proximity and time to a minimum when dealing with patients who have tested positive.
Whenever I take off my N95 mask, I give it a shot of Lysol. It won't disinfect it, not completely, but it will reduce the amount of virus on there. Every little bit helps.
Incidentally, from the CDC: "Among 139 clients exposed to two symptomatic hair stylists with confirmed COVID-19 while both the stylists and the clients wore face masks, [15-45 minutes spent with each client,] no symptomatic secondary cases were reported; among 67 clients tested for SARS-CoV-2, all test results were negative." Not a scientific controlled study, but worth noting.
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A side note on the use of Lysol on an N95 mask...
N95 masks should never be washed, like with soap and water, because it will render the outer layer useless. Similarly, they should never be saturated with water or anything else, including Lysol. (actually, I'm not using Lysol, I'm using Microban. The ingredients are different, but they're basically the same.). Lysol or other spray disinfectants are most definitely NOT recommended by the CDC or pretty much anyone else for disinfecting any type of face mask. The reason is, you don't want to inhale the chemicals in disinfectant sprays (despite what Trump said but didn't actually say). After I wear an N95 mask in public, I give it a light spray of Microban to kill off any coronavirus that might be on the surface of the mask. It will not have any effect on any virus trapped deeper in the mask material. Thoroughly wetting it might, but at that point the mask would be ruined by the saturation.
Still, I don't want to inhale the chemicals, so once I spray a mask, I won't wear that mask again for at least 48 hours. I hang it up and let it air out for a couple or 3 days.
If I wear a mask at a shipper, then at a receiver, and then again to go into a truck stop, I won't spray the mask and then use a different mask each time, but I will at the end of the day. And I make sure to sanitize my hands before putting the mask on, and right after i put it on, and then again right after taking it off.
I'm not advocating the use of disinfectant spray on any mask. But if you do, be aware of the various issues of doing so.
An alternative to spraying at all is to store the mask hanging, or in a paper (not plastic) bag for a week or so, because by then any coronavirus will be dead.
N95 masks should never be washed, like with soap and water, because it will render the outer layer useless. Similarly, they should never be saturated with water or anything else, including Lysol. (actually, I'm not using Lysol, I'm using Microban. The ingredients are different, but they're basically the same.). Lysol or other spray disinfectants are most definitely NOT recommended by the CDC or pretty much anyone else for disinfecting any type of face mask. The reason is, you don't want to inhale the chemicals in disinfectant sprays (despite what Trump said but didn't actually say). After I wear an N95 mask in public, I give it a light spray of Microban to kill off any coronavirus that might be on the surface of the mask. It will not have any effect on any virus trapped deeper in the mask material. Thoroughly wetting it might, but at that point the mask would be ruined by the saturation.
Still, I don't want to inhale the chemicals, so once I spray a mask, I won't wear that mask again for at least 48 hours. I hang it up and let it air out for a couple or 3 days.
If I wear a mask at a shipper, then at a receiver, and then again to go into a truck stop, I won't spray the mask and then use a different mask each time, but I will at the end of the day. And I make sure to sanitize my hands before putting the mask on, and right after i put it on, and then again right after taking it off.
I'm not advocating the use of disinfectant spray on any mask. But if you do, be aware of the various issues of doing so.
An alternative to spraying at all is to store the mask hanging, or in a paper (not plastic) bag for a week or so, because by then any coronavirus will be dead.
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True. UV light will kill the virus. But the UV light won't penetrate deep into the mask material, so UV is only effective on the surface.
Because of the pandemic and hospitals being short of masks, the CDC and others did extensive testing on how to disinfect N95 masks. UV light did horrible in the testing, because it only worked on the surface, and didn't work on the middle layers of material (the electrostatic layers). Microwave ovens were useless, even for the masks that didn't have a metal strip for pinching the hose bridge (the masks with the metal strip simply caught fire). Heating the mask to 160 degrees worked, but rendered the mask only able to filter at about 70 percent. Alcohol, bleach and other liquids caused the mask to be only about 50 percent effective. The only thing that worked and kept the mask's filtering ability above 90 percent was a hydrogen peroxide vapor chamber, which most hospitals don't even have.
For reusable and homemade masks, you could probably use UV light, but you can also just wash them, which is more effective, anyway.
I wonder if putting them inside an ozone machine would disinfect them.
So, with a couple of billion bucks, a vaccine may be here by Christmas, so with a few more billion dollars would a cancer cure be here by Christmas?? Oh wait, if we cure cancer the doctors would be out of Townhome money,,,,lol we cant have all these diseases cured now can we. Im in a mood...happens sometimes
www.nytimes.com
Pfizer Gets $1.95 Billion to Produce Coronavirus Vaccine by Year’s End (Published 2020)
Two pharmaceutical companies announced a nearly $2 billion contract for 600 million doses of a vaccine, with the first 100 million promised before the end of the year.
So far (as far as I know), there has only been one such study, by Yale, which was published a couple of weeks ago. The answer, at least in the manner in which they did the tests, is YES. But they tested at 2 hours and at 80% humidity, and found the masks did not suffer any degradation in filtering or fit, and the ozone killed the bacteria tested (a bacteria that is harder to kill than coronavirus). It isn't yet known if that will translate to home ozone machines, such as CPAP cleaners.
Fauci responds: Dr. Fauci responds to 'mischievous' criticism after he was photographed with mask off at Nationals game
His response seems reasonable to me. Diane, our gym staff and I wear masks at work, but when we eat or drink, they come off. We advertise that our staff is masked. If someone wanted to get a photo of us not wearing masks, compose the photo to suggest we are not eating or drinking, and then charge us with hypocrcicy, that is certainly possible, but it would be a bad-faith act and the charge would be groundless. Yes, we're wearing masks and making a good-faith effort to protect others from the virus by doing so. No, we do not achieve a state of pure mask perfection every second of every day. It is possible to snap a photo of us that is indeed a photo of a particular instant, but does not communicate the truth.
Such a photo would be akin to a video of a driver getting into his/her truck and driving away without doing a PTI, and then suggesting he/she is an unsafe driver. Or a video of a trucker drifting across the center line one time and suggesting the same. Yes, it happened, but there is more to the story that tells the real truth.
That said, it was careless of Fauci to allow himself to be photographed as he was. He should have known a million eyes are on him even when no camera obviously is.
Somewhat related is the Sandmann story in which the kid is hitting the litigation jackpot in his suits against multiple news organizations and others. That's a case where a video was taken out of context, lies were told based on it, and now the media must pay.
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