It’s hard and crazy and the disinformation is everywhere but persevere. There are still roses. Hopes for treatment and maybe even a cure though I’m worried there it’ll be years.
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Somehow, things go on
Category: Covid-19
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Six feet is the wrong model
A friend sent me this paper on Arxiv.org – “A physicist view of the airborne infection” by Luis A. Anchordoqui and Eugene M. Chudnovsky. They used SimScale to model airflow in an office and included a couple of nice visualizations:
The paper is quite concise and worth your time, just under 2.5 pages. Short version? Six feet ain’t enough and your office is a Petri dish.
From the physics point of view, we cannot find a good justification for a stationary 6-feet separation in a situation when people spend long time together in a room. Droplets containing the virus move in the air via convection. The convection pattern in a room can be very complex; see Fig. 1. It depends on the location of air conditioners, radiators, windows, and all items in the room, as well as on people producing vortices by moving around. The existing vortices in the air can make a location far away from the source of droplets more dangerous than the location 6 feet away. This applies to meeting rooms, office spaces, supermarkets, department stores, etc. The airflow pattern should be studied for all such facilities to avoid the spread of infection to large distances from a single infected person. The safest rooms must be those equipped with the air sucking ventilator at the top, like hospital surgery rooms
Luis A. Anchordoqui and Eugene M. Chudnovsky
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.13689.pdf?referringSource=articleShare
What he said.
Melody from “Seven Nation Army” and rewrite it as a vocal fugue. Genius!
Forwarded on a local Slack from a former co-worker, whose wife found it on Facebook. I’m looking for the author and will update if I find him/her.
Although most of the studies in the Cochrane Review were on medical workers in a hospital setting, one study followed community transmission of SARS in Beijing. It found that consistently wearing a mask in public was associated with a 70% reduction in risk of catching SARS. Additionally, the authors of the paper noted that most people in the community wore simple surgical masks, not N95 respirators.
What’s the Evidence on Face Masks? What You Heard Was Probably Wrong
Yep, early advice was wrong – get masks and wear them. Can’t find them in stock? Sites are popping up with instructions on how to DIY:
Found via the invaluable Kottke, this omnibus post covers a lot of my worries. We’re isolated but with a family of four, we need to buy food roughly weekly and I’ve been losing sleep over questions like this. Well worth your time.
The antimalarials are much in the news due to Covid-19, so here’s an actual expert who knows them well and can explain. TL;DR – they’re unlikely to be much help as treatment.
The author is Derek Lowe, long a favorite of mine for his “Things I won’t work with” series and I recommend him highly.
ultracrepidarian 