COVID factsheet

From DHS

a flier about basic COVID-19 precautions - particularly for small events/gatherings. All the icons and entire flier are CC0/public domain/free to use: less COVID  

How to control airborne viruses

Excellent overview with links from Joey Fox

Respiratory pathogens, including influenza, COVID-19, RSV, measles, tuberculosis, and the common cold, primarily spread through the airborne route.

When an infectious person breathes, talks, sings, coughs, or sneezes, they release respiratory particles from their mouth or nose that can contain infectious viruses or bacteria. Larger respiratory particles fall to the floor quickly. Smaller respiratory particles, which are called aerosols, can float in the air. The main way most people get infected with respiratory pathogens is by inhaling a sufficient dose of infectious respiratory aerosols over time. This is known as airborne transmission, aerosol transmission or inhalation transmission.

Transmission of airborne diseases happens when people share air. The main risk for airborne transmission is:

• short-range airborne transmission: when you are within about two meters from an infectious person.
• shared-room airborne transmission: when you share a room with an infectious person. This is the cause of super-spreader events where many people can get infected at once. Smaller rooms, crowded spaces and poorly ventilated areas create higher risk for transmission.

The dose makes the poison.

The higher the dose, the greater the risk of infection. A model of how this works can be seen in this publication.

The Relative infection risk parameter increases with 

• higher virus emission, 
• higher activity, 
• higher breathing rate and 
• duration of exposure. 

It decreases with 

• better masking and 
• better air cleaning.

On intellectual humility

What it means and how it can help solve seemingly intractable political problems

intellectual humility is the willingness to admit that something you believe might be wrong. Think of it as a cousin of open-mindedness or a willingness to listen and carefully consider someone else’s truths. The concept isn’t entirely new—Aristotle and others in the philosophical tradition spoke of intellectual virtues—but there has been a marked increase in research on the subject by behavioral psychologists and other social scientists in the last twenty years. In this series, Conversations on Intellectual Humility, we bring the conversation back to the agora, pairing scholars of intellectual humility with community leaders to explore manifestations of intellectual humility outside the academy.

Public health has failed us re COVID

So, 

is there anything to be done?

Unless we change course urgently- unless we fight back against the normalization of constant illness and the individualization of a critical public good- we are going to see a long, slow, across-the-board decline in health and life expectancy amid increasingly uncontrollable disease outbreaks and overwhelmed hospital systems. 

We have the technology and knowledge to mitigate disease spread. Let’s fight for a future that is safer, better, and healthier than the world we grew up in, rather than sicker, crueler, and technologically regressed. If we don’t face reality and understand what we’re sacrificing right now, the next generation certainly will.

we need a strong, institutional response including new ventilation and filtration standards that would immediately and significantly reduce virus in the air and airborne viral spread generally.

Given that we are now in “you do you” free for all,  

what can you do?

COVID is not a cold- it’s a car accident. Every bout of COVID is a gamble with your health. There are things you can do concretely to reduce your risk of a negative outcome, and so it’s important to know that you have COVID. We will discuss this more in our next post, coming next week.

So, what can you do?

There are a few simple measures you can take to maximize your chances of riding a COVID wave without getting infected. The basic idea is to 

• reduce overall exposure, 
• minimize the amount of virus in the air, 
• shrink the amount of virus you breathe in, 
• interrupt the virus’s ability to take hold if you breathe it in, and 
• limit viral load and odds of onward transmission if you become infected. 

Again, the tools available are not all or nothing options – it’s about layering as much protection as possible to minimize risk as much as possible.

Create a robust secret

Four chunks.

Any single chunk is uninformative but any two chunks can restore the original secret.

psst