State your opinion on COVID-19

On 3/30/2020 5:58 AM, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 29.03.2020 um 03:40 schrieb John B.:
how long does a
virus, or perhaps more accurately a virion, remain viable and able to
infect another creature if it is outside a living body. Or in simple
terms if a virion falls on the floor how long can it lay there and
still be capable of causing a disease?

This is completely unknown.Â* What we do know are some numbers how long
the virus DNA is detectable on various surfaces.Â* We do not know how
much virus load is needed to trigger an infection (with measles it's
very few, with COVID, it's probably a lot), and we don't know how long
the virus stays in an active form outside the body.

The only thing that we can safely say is that smear contagion is a very
minor source of infection compared to droplet contagion.

I had been wondering about required viral load with this virus, with the
understanding that it is probably an unknown.

Regarding "smear contagion": I've seen a photograph of a certain very
intelligent guy - an online colleague whom I've met - spraying down his
groceries in his driveway. According to this article, that's probably
gross overkill:
https://vitals.lifehacker.com/you-do...ies-1842528397

They emphasize that finding viral RNA is not the same thing as finding
an infectious virus particle.

--
- Frank Krygowski

Tom Kunich writes:

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 7:19:17 PM UTC-7, Radey Shouman wrote:
AMuzi writes:

On 3/29/2020 7:57 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:01:53 +0300, Eric Pozharski
wrote:

with John B wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:45:07 -0700 (PDT), Sir Ridesalot
wrote:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020 12:01:47 UTC-4, Frank Krygowski wrote:

As usual, discussions here have devolved into childish name calling
by some, demeaning published facts and data, quick political jabs,
defensive changes of subjet, and "I know better than anyone"
allusions. Things get obscured.
*SKIP*
Thailand has imposed some pretty draconian regulations to fight the
virus and while I'm not sure whether it is a viable calculation their
new cases number is 8% of total cases. The U.S. with apparently fewer
restrictions has a new case total of about 14% of the total cases. At
this rate the U.S. will exceed 200,000 cases in about 4 more days :-(

For kernel's sake, can we start to think in ratios, plz? Let me reframe
this.

X -- grand total cases (not mentioned in the post by "John B"; I'm
not going to figure out at how many it is/was (at time of
posting by "John B"))
x_t -- cases in Thailand (0.08X)
x_u -- cases in USA (0.14X)
p_t -- population in Thailland (694 of 100K people, estimate 2018)
p_u -- population in USA (3087 of 100K people, estimate 2019)

Now, r_t would be ( x_t X / p_t ) or ( 1.15e-4 X ), and r_u would be
( x_u X / p_u ) or ( 4.54e-5 X ).

Now, it looks like USA is going 2.54 better then Thailand. But
important question is -- at what timespan?

plz fill in blanks and/or correct me if I'm wrong.

You don't have to do all that fancy figuring. Just look at
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The U.S. has 426 cases per 1,000,000 population and Thailand has 20
cases per 1,000,000 population. The U.S. has had 7 deaths/1 million
and Thailand 0.1/1 million.
Oh Yes, "time span" The U.S. reported their first virus case on 10
January and Thailand on 12 January. The U.S. reported 7,412 new cases
as of March 29, 2020, 22:34 GMT and Thailand reported 143 ( that is
22.47/1 million and 2.0). If daily the difference is so great than 2
days is negligible :-)
--
cheers,

John B.


As yet there's no way to know how many people are/ were infected,
asymptomatic carriers, recovered without result or report, and so on.
These are preliminary figures and as is often said, in war the first
three reports are wrong.

On the Diamond Princess it is estimated that 17.9% of infected persons
never developed any symptoms at all. I don't think they would be tested
anywhere in the US given current pre-test screening.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm

And you also have to consider the clientel of cruise ships. In the
winter it is mostly old retired people precisely the target audience
of the virus. So even the most vulnerable are not that vulnerable to
this virus.

The passengers of the Diamond Princess seem to have been almost all
older, 69 was the median age. Of course the crew, which were almost a
third of the people on board, were younger, median 36. It seems that
the crews of the cruise ships were largely responsible for spreading the
virus from one ship to another; I'm not sure if that was because crew
members stations or because they simply visited one another.

--

On 3/30/2020 10:31 AM, Radey Shouman wrote:
John B. writes:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 21:34:36 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 3/29/2020 9:24 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Sir Ridesalot writes:

On Sunday, 29 March 2020 21:02:23 UTC-4, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:37:44 -0000 (UTC), news18
wrote:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 13:12:34 +0700, John B. wrote:


It depends on the surface. For sars-Cov2, Cu about 4 hours to plastic
for weeks.
also depends on the mu-flora and wheather if gets consumed '

Ok, on a plastic surface it is viable for weeks. But what is Cu? and I
did look... and came across 82 definitions, starting with Credit Union
and ending with Coefficient of Utilization.
--
cheers,

John B.

Cu (from Latin: cuprum)is the symbol for copper.

Cheers

Or Christian Union, or Coming Unglued, or Celeron Unit, or Cardiac Unit,
or... :-)

Yes, any of those might have it too, but you wouldn't normally define
them as a surface

I was attempting to point out how ludicrous this constant use of
abbreviations is. I mean, well... if you can't spell than, what the
hell, just look it up.

But apparently I was being too subtle :-(
--
cheers,

John B.

A LOT of people use their cell phone to access this newsgroup and thus
rely on abbreviations to keep their texts shorter.

Chemists use them because they are understood regardless of language,
although I'm not sure what they do in non-Latin scripts.


Now there's a great question! And 'technical' too !
I had no idea but it turns out to be amazingly universal:

https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/...aElementov.png

https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/...huuki-hyou.png

Hey Mr Slocumb:
http://canov.jergym.cz/vyhledav/varianty/th.gif

Yup, seems to be a chart of how letters of the English alphabet are
pronounced. For Thai children, I'd guess.

I can't read Thai, but it's plainly a periodic table of the elements,
for Thai children learning chemistry, I'd guess. you can see the
pictures illustrating a use of each element, for example Mn (manganese)
is an i-beam, S (sulfur) is a vulcanized rubber tire, Co (cobalt) is a
magnet, H (hydrogen) is a zeppelin.

Sc (scandium) is a bicycle, I had no idea what that was about, but it
seems that scandium alluminum alloys are a thing:

http://www.konabikeworld.com/08_tech_scandium.htm

Nice find.


We've sold Scandium alloy aluminum Santanas for 20 years.
Sorta 'old tech' material. They're getting killed off by
carbon Santanas now.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 3/30/2020 5:58 AM, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 29.03.2020 um 03:40 schrieb John B.:
how long does a
virus, or perhaps more accurately a virion, remain viable and able to
infect another creature if it is outside a living body. Or in simple
terms if a virion falls on the floor how long can it lay there and
still be capable of causing a disease?

This is completely unknown.* What we do know are some numbers how long
the virus DNA is detectable on various surfaces.* We do not know how
much virus load is needed to trigger an infection (with measles it's
very few, with COVID, it's probably a lot), and we don't know how long
the virus stays in an active form outside the body.

The only thing that we can safely say is that smear contagion is a very
minor source of infection compared to droplet contagion.

So how much are you willing to bet on it?

I had been wondering about required viral load with this virus, with the
understanding that it is probably an unknown.

Regarding "smear contagion": I've seen a photograph of a certain very
intelligent guy - an online colleague whom I've met - spraying down his
groceries in his driveway. According to this article, that's probably
gross overkill:
https://vitals.lifehacker.com/you-do...ies-1842528397

Your online colleague might be both overdoing it and not using effective
means to destroy the virus before whirling it at his direction, but he
probably is more intelligent than some journo who warns her rather clueless
readership about ingesting soap.

--
No, China Commies lied??
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/chi...020182846.html

On 3/30/2020 9:13 AM, AMuzi wrote:
On 3/30/2020 12:35 AM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 22:12:20 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 3/29/2020 9:52 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:09:40 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 3/29/2020 7:57 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:01:53 +0300, Eric Pozharski
wrote:

with John B wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:45:07 -0700 (PDT), Sir Ridesalot
wrote:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020 12:01:47 UTC-4, Frank KrygowskiÂ* wrote:

As usual, discussions here have devolved into childish name
calling
by some, demeaning published facts and data, quick political
jabs,
defensive changes of subjet, and "I know better than anyone"
allusions.Â* Things get obscured.
*SKIP*
Thailand has imposed some pretty draconianÂ* regulations to fight
the
virus and while I'm not sure whether it is a viable calculation
their
new cases number is 8% of total cases. The U.S. with apparently
fewer
restrictions has a new case total of about 14% of the total
cases. At
this rate the U.S. will exceed 200,000 cases in about 4 more
days :-(

For kernel's sake, can we start to think in ratios, plz?Â* Let me
reframe
this.

Â*Â*Â* XÂ*Â* -- grand total cases (not mentioned in the post by "John
B";Â* I'm
Â*Â*Â*Â* not going to figure out at how many it is/was (at time of
Â*Â*Â*Â* posting by "John B"))
Â*Â*Â* x_t -- cases in Thailand (0.08X)
Â*Â*Â* x_u -- cases in USA (0.14X)
Â*Â*Â* p_t -- population in Thailland (694 of 100K people, estimate
2018)
Â*Â*Â* p_u -- population in USA (3087 of 100K people, estimate 2019)

Now, r_t would be ( x_t X / p_t ) or ( 1.15e-4 X ), and r_u would be
( x_u X / p_u ) or ( 4.54e-5 X ).

Now, it looks like USA is going 2.54 better then Thailand.Â* But
important question is -- at what timespan?

plz fill in blanks and/or correct me if I'm wrong.

You don't have to do all that fancy figuring. Just look at
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The U.S. has 426 cases per 1,000,000 population and Thailand has 20
cases per 1,000,000 population. The U.S. has had 7 deaths/1 million
and Thailand 0.1/1 million.
Oh Yes, "time span" The U.S. reported their first virus case on 10
January and Thailand on 12 January. The U.S. reported 7,412 new cases
as of March 29, 2020, 22:34 GMT and Thailand reported 143 ( that is
22.47/1 million and 2.0). If daily the difference is so great thanÂ* 2
days is negligible :-)

As yet there's no way to know how many people are/ were
infected, asymptomatic carriers, recovered without result or
report, and so on.Â* These are preliminary figures and as is
often said, in war the first three reports are wrong.

Ah yes... but preliminary numbers are all that there are :-0

As for "the first three reports are wrong"... I suspect that depends
greatly on what the reports are. For example, it was said that the
U.S. daily reporting of enemy killed during the Vietnam fiasco, if
added up, amounted to something like the entire population of N.
Vietnam.


I can't recall who coined that phrase, Napoleon maybe? But
it's much quoted and often spot-on.

Sort of like Custer and the boys coming over the hill and thinking,
"Hell, they are only Indians" :-)



The actual quotation is General Sedgewick'sÂ* "They couldn't hit an
elephant at this distance." after which he was felled from his horse by
a sniper and died.

The version I read was "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."


--
- Frank Krygowski

On 3/30/2020 9:23 AM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:09:50 PM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 3/29/2020 7:57 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:01:53 +0300, Eric Pozharski
wrote:

with John B wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:45:07 -0700 (PDT), Sir Ridesalot
wrote:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020 12:01:47 UTC-4, Frank Krygowski wrote:

As usual, discussions here have devolved into childish name calling
by some, demeaning published facts and data, quick political jabs,
defensive changes of subjet, and "I know better than anyone"
allusions. Things get obscured.
*SKIP*
Thailand has imposed some pretty draconian regulations to fight the
virus and while I'm not sure whether it is a viable calculation their
new cases number is 8% of total cases. The U.S. with apparently fewer
restrictions has a new case total of about 14% of the total cases. At
this rate the U.S. will exceed 200,000 cases in about 4 more days :-(

For kernel's sake, can we start to think in ratios, plz? Let me reframe
this.

X -- grand total cases (not mentioned in the post by "John B"; I'm
not going to figure out at how many it is/was (at time of
posting by "John B"))
x_t -- cases in Thailand (0.08X)
x_u -- cases in USA (0.14X)
p_t -- population in Thailland (694 of 100K people, estimate 2018)
p_u -- population in USA (3087 of 100K people, estimate 2019)

Now, r_t would be ( x_t X / p_t ) or ( 1.15e-4 X ), and r_u would be
( x_u X / p_u ) or ( 4.54e-5 X ).

Now, it looks like USA is going 2.54 better then Thailand. But
important question is -- at what timespan?

plz fill in blanks and/or correct me if I'm wrong.

You don't have to do all that fancy figuring. Just look at
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The U.S. has 426 cases per 1,000,000 population and Thailand has 20
cases per 1,000,000 population. The U.S. has had 7 deaths/1 million
and Thailand 0.1/1 million.
Oh Yes, "time span" The U.S. reported their first virus case on 10
January and Thailand on 12 January. The U.S. reported 7,412 new cases
as of March 29, 2020, 22:34 GMT and Thailand reported 143 ( that is
22.47/1 million and 2.0). If daily the difference is so great than 2
days is negligible :-)
--
cheers,

John B.


As yet there's no way to know how many people are/ were
infected, asymptomatic carriers, recovered without result or
report, and so on. These are preliminary figures and as is
often said, in war the first three reports are wrong.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

They have again ceased testing people that are not showing serious symptoms. So again that means is that those testing positive are only the 20% of people that aren't asymptomatic or with mild to very moderate symptoms. I is very serious that they are not even attempting to get an accurate baseline to judge mortality rates with.

Tom, you keep harping on your theory that this virus isn't very bad, and
your theory that the mortality rate is grossly overstated.

You've harped on the fact that the flu can kill tens of thousands, so
this virus is no worse than the flu.

Weirdly, your orange hero seems to have stopped listening to you. He's
now saying that IF we can hold U.S. deaths to 100,000 that will be a
"very good job."

You need to give him another phone call. Set the man straight!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-very-good-job


--
- Frank Krygowski

AMuzi writes:

On 3/30/2020 10:31 AM, Radey Shouman wrote:
John B. writes:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 21:34:36 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 3/29/2020 9:24 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Sir Ridesalot writes:

On Sunday, 29 March 2020 21:02:23 UTC-4, John B. wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:37:44 -0000 (UTC), news18
wrote:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 13:12:34 +0700, John B. wrote:


It depends on the surface. For sars-Cov2, Cu about 4 hours
to plastic
for weeks.
also depends on the mu-flora and wheather if gets consumed '

Ok, on a plastic surface it is viable for weeks. But what
is Cu? and I
did look... and came across 82 definitions, starting with
Credit Union
and ending with Coefficient of Utilization.
--
cheers,

John B.

Cu (from Latin: cuprum)is the symbol for copper.

Cheers

Or Christian Union, or Coming Unglued, or Celeron Unit, or
Cardiac Unit,
or... :-)

Yes, any of those might have it too, but you wouldn't normally define
them as a surface

I was attempting to point out how ludicrous this constant use of
abbreviations is. I mean, well... if you can't spell than, what the
hell, just look it up.

But apparently I was being too subtle :-(
--
cheers,

John B.

A LOT of people use their cell phone to access this newsgroup and thus
rely on abbreviations to keep their texts shorter.

Chemists use them because they are understood regardless of language,
although I'm not sure what they do in non-Latin scripts.


Now there's a great question! And 'technical' too !
I had no idea but it turns out to be amazingly universal:

https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/...aElementov.png

https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/...huuki-hyou.png

Hey Mr Slocumb:
http://canov.jergym.cz/vyhledav/varianty/th.gif

Yup, seems to be a chart of how letters of the English alphabet are
pronounced. For Thai children, I'd guess.

I can't read Thai, but it's plainly a periodic table of the elements,
for Thai children learning chemistry, I'd guess. you can see the
pictures illustrating a use of each element, for example Mn (manganese)
is an i-beam, S (sulfur) is a vulcanized rubber tire, Co (cobalt) is a
magnet, H (hydrogen) is a zeppelin.

Sc (scandium) is a bicycle, I had no idea what that was about, but it
seems that scandium alluminum alloys are a thing:

http://www.konabikeworld.com/08_tech_scandium.htm

Nice find.


We've sold Scandium alloy aluminum Santanas for 20 years. Sorta 'old
tech' material. They're getting killed off by carbon Santanas now.

For C, the chart has a pencil -- get with the program, Thailand!

I had to figure out what Ba (barium) had to do with teapots:

https://www.google.com/search?q=bari...eapot&tbm=isch

On 3/29/2020 11:26 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
John B. writes:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 21:18:54 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 3/29/2020 1:35 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Frank Krygowski writes:

On 3/28/2020 7:15 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Frank Krygowski writes:


We have one friend with whom we shared a six-foot-separated
picnic. She has no symptoms, but she had to take off her mask to
eat. Other friends (we've seen a dozen, max) have been almost as
careful, but no masks.

A dozen since the Ohio "shelter in place" order? Honestly that seems
like a large number to me. Our social life is pretty much all remote
now, aside from two or three chance meetings.

About half of those were on March 17, before the official order, but
even then we were being very careful. At that time, they had said "6
feet minimum" and (I think) "no more than 10 in a group."

I interpreted the figure of ten people as an upper limit for gatherings
not exempted, not carte blanche to get together with nine of your
friends. But until the tear gas drones are deployed each of us must use
his own best judgement.

We were careful. There were seven of us in a 20' x 40' room, spaced at
least six feet apart, playing musical instruments. Twelve days later,
none have any symptoms. I don't think we did anything dangerous.

Ah Frank! If there were seven of you in a room and twelve days later
none of the twelve have any symptoms it wouldn't be proof that you did
the right thing. It would be proof that none of you had the disease.
:-)

Proof they didn't have the disease, but not proof that they didn't have
the virus, nor proof that they were incapable of passing it on.

Really, unless everyone is tested (an impossibility), we're gambling
based on badly estimated probabilities. So we use reasonable judgment,
hopefully erring on the side of caution. In our case, it's now 13 days
with no evidence of any problem.

On our hike yesterday, we saw many, many young couples for whom "social
distance" was, well, zero. At that age, throwing caution to the wind is
admirable proof of affection. I suppose it might be fine enough if they
were extremely diligent before contacting anyone else - but I doubt that
would be the case.


--
- Frank Krygowski

Sepp Ruf writes:

Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 3/30/2020 5:58 AM, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 29.03.2020 um 03:40 schrieb John B.:
how long does a
virus, or perhaps more accurately a virion, remain viable and able to
infect another creature if it is outside a living body. Or in simple
terms if a virion falls on the floor how long can it lay there and
still be capable of causing a disease?

This is completely unknown.Â* What we do know are some numbers how long
the virus DNA is detectable on various surfaces.Â* We do not know how
much virus load is needed to trigger an infection (with measles it's
very few, with COVID, it's probably a lot), and we don't know how long
the virus stays in an active form outside the body.

The only thing that we can safely say is that smear contagion is a very
minor source of infection compared to droplet contagion.

So how much are you willing to bet on it?

I had been wondering about required viral load with this virus, with the
understanding that it is probably an unknown.

Regarding "smear contagion": I've seen a photograph of a certain very
intelligent guy - an online colleague whom I've met - spraying down his
groceries in his driveway. According to this article, that's probably
gross overkill:
https://vitals.lifehacker.com/you-do...ies-1842528397

Your online colleague might be both overdoing it and not using effective
means to destroy the virus before whirling it at his direction, but he
probably is more intelligent than some journo who warns her rather clueless
readership about ingesting soap.

I have to agree there, I lost all confidence after the soap comment.
Has the food expert never heard of rinsing?

We have been wiping down perishable packages from the stores, and
leaving others to sit in the garage for a few days.


--

Frank Krygowski writes:

On 3/29/2020 11:26 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
John B. writes:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 21:18:54 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 3/29/2020 1:35 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Frank Krygowski writes:

On 3/28/2020 7:15 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
Frank Krygowski writes:


We have one friend with whom we shared a six-foot-separated
picnic. She has no symptoms, but she had to take off her mask to
eat. Other friends (we've seen a dozen, max) have been almost as
careful, but no masks.

A dozen since the Ohio "shelter in place" order? Honestly that seems
like a large number to me. Our social life is pretty much all remote
now, aside from two or three chance meetings.

About half of those were on March 17, before the official order, but
even then we were being very careful. At that time, they had said "6
feet minimum" and (I think) "no more than 10 in a group."

I interpreted the figure of ten people as an upper limit for gatherings
not exempted, not carte blanche to get together with nine of your
friends. But until the tear gas drones are deployed each of us must use
his own best judgement.

We were careful. There were seven of us in a 20' x 40' room, spaced at
least six feet apart, playing musical instruments. Twelve days later,
none have any symptoms. I don't think we did anything dangerous.

Ah Frank! If there were seven of you in a room and twelve days later
none of the twelve have any symptoms it wouldn't be proof that you did
the right thing. It would be proof that none of you had the disease.
:-)

Proof they didn't have the disease, but not proof that they didn't have
the virus, nor proof that they were incapable of passing it on.

Really, unless everyone is tested (an impossibility), we're gambling
based on badly estimated probabilities. So we use reasonable judgment,
hopefully erring on the side of caution. In our case, it's now 13 days
with no evidence of any problem.

The point was that even if *you* are ok, you can still present a danger
to others.

On our hike yesterday, we saw many, many young couples for whom
"social distance" was, well, zero. At that age, throwing caution to
the wind is admirable proof of affection. I suppose it might be fine
enough if they were extremely diligent before contacting anyone else -
but I doubt that would be the case.

--