The COVID 19 outbreak. Does it mean MORE backpacking this year?

[Roger Caffin]

> expensive masks like n95 are better for the wearer, but actually not good at protecting us from the wearer.
It sticks in my mind that the N95 design has an exhaust valve for exhaling. This would probably block aerosols from coming out, from the wearer.

I also read that a layer or two of paper vaccuum cleaner bag was not bad – wrapped in the remains of an old T-shirt. Need to get some sealing of course.

Cheers

[W I S N E R !]

“It sticks in my mind that the N95 design has an exhaust valve for exhaling.”

Some do, some don’t.  I have to use them nearly daily at work.  The rubber seals in the exhaust valves must be checked; they can stiffen and rot out with age rendering a mask useless…but a piece of electrical/duct tape sealing the valve can fix the issue (but turns it into a standard mask with no valve).  Tape could also be used on a mask with a good rubber valve seal if the wearer wanted to make it valveless (and useful for bystanders, not just the wearer).

[W I S N E R !]

“A mask is better than no mask. That’s it.”

Thank you.

[HkNewman]

On the technical side of things, there will likely be simple antibody tests to see if people have been exposed.   Then the next questions is how much immunity do they have?  If many can spread without being visibly sick, that suggests some sort of immunity iirc.  Also how long would this immunity last and how much achieves herd immunity?

Then what is done with the immunity?  Use it as a “passport” to return to work (or at least for face-to-face jobs) or be able to travel freely is being discussed in some quarters until herd immunity is achieved.

[HkNewman]

close off towns

There’s migration to smaller areas part due to the virus and partly due to job loss in the bigger cities.

One of the authors (below link) pointed out that a similar (temporary) migration was seen during the 1918 pandemic but also the return to city life sparked the Roaring 20’s.  Will this be the same?  As this situation settles, articles mention elderly may not want to stay in NYC and city real estate may become a bit cheaper for the young too.  There may be back and forth, plus don’t forget the suburbs.

Good for modern small towns is they initially attract city dwellers with really nice coffee shops and maybe eateries, health food stores, etc..

Bad however is most do not have the good  internet seen in bigger cities and fewer health resources, including far less hospital beds.  The plan is typically ship certain patients off to partner hospitals in bigger towns and cities.  Always been the situation but this pandemic has really spotlighted this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coronavirus-great-american-migration/2020/03/28/b59d4d44-6f6f-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html?outputType=amp

Ultimately it comes back to a decision each town needs to make in terms of does it want to grow or not?

[James Marco]

Well, not knowing the exact details of the antibody test, I can merely surmise that it detects extremely small amounts, ie ineffective amounts.

The infectious cycle starts when you are exposed to a single (usually more than one) virus. At first it simply penetrates your bodily cells and the viral DNA/RNA turns them into a factory for producing more viruses. In an exponential growth, this happens rapidly among the 35 trillion cells in the body.

Somewhere along the line, it tries to infect the wrong cell, usually a lymph node cell, where instead of more viruses, it produces the correct antibody to kill the infection. Between these two events you are normally asymptomatic. Some viruses simply produce 2 or 4 copies of themselves. Some turn host cells into factories producing thousands of virus phages. I am not familiar with the mechanism of growth for Corona Virus.   Anyway, in between, there is some finite time period that the patient is asymptomatic, and, producing antibodies. The first couple days a human body might not produce any antibody, for the next 5-11 days it will produce atibodies at an ever increasing rate, even when you are over the disease, it will likely over-produce antibodies. But, a certain level of antibodies is needed to maintain immunity to the disease. Eventually your body will decrease productioin of the disease specific antibody intill you get a partial infection again…then you might get the “sniffles” for a day while your body ramps up production, again. We have all experienced days where we don’t feel all that well, but the next day feel fine…left over immunity, often a virus. Sometimes the “immunity” can cause interactions with other “immunities” as in the case of “mumps” and “shingles”. You cannot get shingles without the antibody for mumps. Anyway… “immunity” can lead to other “not-immunity” to other diseases. I believe this answers the question of how long immunity will last. Again, it is statistical, but usually well weighted to recovery based on how soon you have recovered from the disease. It is possible to be immune (not have any virus in your system,) catch a disease, (have a virus in your system) and have the body kill it 100% within 24 hours. No one has this type of immunity with COVID19 that we have found.

The production of antibodies means one of two things: you have had the disease and are over it, or, you currently have the disease. There are several mechanisms for antibody production, and action, I won’t get into here.  Anyway, tests can detect proteins very easily by type, so a really small amount is detectable in a test. But they need your history to determine which phase you are in. Some people react badly, ie, produce the wrong antibody…usually fatal.

Different individuals have different reactions to being infected. You have 35trillion cells in your body, it takes an antibody producing cell to be infected to start producing antibodies (resistance) to any disease so it is entirely statistical. This answers the question of how much immunity anyone has…it is expressed as a bell curve normalized to the infectious rate of the disease…think of a normal gausian curve offset over a population to the regular infectios cycle of a disease.  This is like saying how infectious is a disease? Note a fatality is NOT cured for the purposes of normalization.

Herd immunity??  Not a real thing. This is only a sociological term to express a 50% exposure of a population. We WILL get there. But it is mixing topics, ie not apples and oranges. It is never 100% safe to allow exposed people back into the general population because they “could” always carry small amounts of the disease at any time. But, the chances of picking it up is very low as long as they have a minimum level of antibodies and have already “gotten over” the disease. No, I don’t know what a “minimum level” is. No, I don’t know what the definition for “gotten over” a virus is…it may have become permanently embedded into your genetic makeup for life.  I don’t do trumpisms well, I guess. Except he would never say this because it would take a full 18 months at the current rate. He would say NOW it is safe to ignore the virus because I have antibody doners and I don’t care how many I kill off and the upper 10% of the age group of the world doesn’t pay me anyway and I don’t understand all this shit.

[HkNewman]

Think what will be needed in the future is a national standard to many of these numbers and procedures.  Especially when dealing, in the US, with interstate travel, interstate highways, and federally supported airports.

Getting back to the OP, Dr. Fauci predicts a second wave this fall is likely, so think I’ll be basing any travel plans on that.

[HkNewman]

… besides a lot of basic science yet to be performed on this (just to add to my previous post).

[Jerry Adams]

I don’t see much difference between going to a secluded place vs just staying inside your house in the city – either will give you protectiom

I can go out for a walk and stay well away from other people.  I think you could do that even in dense cities.  In a city you’re closer to services like food, healthcare, electricity,…  Unless you’re totally self sufficient, if you live in the boonies you’ll still have to interact with other people occasionally.

The disease was initially passed between people at an old people’s home, but that could have just as easily been located in a rural area.  And it was passed between family members – if you have a family in a rural area it would be the same.

I was just listening to a 99% indivisible podcast about that Alaska earthquake.  People predicted civilization would break down and people would start fighting over necessities,  but actually people were cooperative and got through it.  I think that’s a much more likely response to a crisis.

[obx hiker]

OK so a mask won’t limit the extent of the spread in distance and area of an exhaled complex molecule.

and also won’t limit the potential for inhaling such whether as a droplet or aerosolized.

IOW masks are not perfect

I see….. very interesting.

[obx hiker]

Example of poor social distancing

Dance the Night Away

[Roger Caffin]

Bad however is most [small towns] do not have the good internet seen in bigger cities and fewer health resources, including far less hospital beds.

Now that IS a role for the (Federal) government: legislation to force the carriers to provide top-quality Internet connections to all small towns – or lose their franchise. There would be huge screams from the current carriers of course, and it would never happen under a Republican government, but I am sure that We The People would accept it without hesitation.

Cheers

[Dave @ Oware]

Early masks used wool as a filter. It traps particles in three ways.

1. Some just bump directly into the fiber and stick.

2. The tiny particles like .3 microns , travel in wild paths, Brownian something something and then bump into the wider openings of the fibers,

3. Static electricity also draws some particles to the fiber.

 

Modern masks use polypro to do some of the same filtering.

So much misinformation and confusion out there about masks. I read a head doctor saying not to use polyester since it promoted germ growth (not seeing viruses growing on a piece of polyester fiber). Another Hospital head said polyester was best for other reasons. A third doctor recommended high thread count cotton sheets of 4 layers (that is impossible to breath thru, so the air just comes out the sides of the mask). A fourth expert said use Tyvek. I wouldn’t sleep in a fully zipped up Tyvek Bivy much less try to use one for mask fabric.

Masks worn by everyone will likely reduce the load a bit, so are worthwhile, but as one air pollution expert on how far such particles traveled said-“if a person were to be smoking, would you smell the smoke at the distance you were from them? If so, you are too close.

[Nick Gatel]

Now that IS a role for the (Federal) government: legislation to force the carriers to provide top-quality Internet connections to all small towns – or lose their franchise.

So I am going through the Constitution of the United States and I don’t find this.

I do see that the federal government can regulate commerce “among the several states,” and “establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

So it seems this might be a State power? Of course, lets get down to the root evil – governments giving exclusive franchises?

[Nick Gatel]

So I went to the bank today with my bandana ala “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” No problem at all.

[Kattt]

This is our connection on a good night.

 

I live in a small rural community with awful internet and phone connection but we won’t allow anything better.  No competition allowed so we’re stuck with this.

[Kattt]

“So I went to the bank today with my bandana ala “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” No problem at all.”

We did the same last week. Amazing. No reusable bags at the grocery store either. Still waiting on gloves at the gas station.

[Roger Caffin]

I do see that the federal government can regulate commerce “among the several states,” and “establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

But then, I don’t think the Founding Fathers anticipated the Internet itself. So not finding the Internet in the Constitution is a straw man.

However, they DID anticipate the value of good communications – aka Post Offices and Post Roads, and I would argue that it is entirely reasonable to extrapolate this by several hundred years, to modern communications. The Internet is not fundamentally different from other forms of communication.

Equally, my impression is that the big carriers are financially larger than many States, so that the States are not in a position to deal with them. Only the Federal government has the strength to do this. That being the case, it should – for the benefit of the people.

Still waiting on gloves at the gas station.

Self-reliance.

Cheers

[Geoff Caplan]

Kattt – wow – those are truly terrible figures. I sure wouldn’t want to be isolated with that kind of connectivity.

The anti-competitive structure of internet services in the US is puzzling in the land that’s supposed to epitomise free enterprise.

Here in the UK we we have open competition between many providers, with a national policy driven hard by central government. I’m isolating for the duration in a small fishing village and connectivity here ranges from 40 – 70 Mbps depending on how much you want to spend. You guys are paying 3x the UK average for a much worse connection, and 5x the average in South Korea where connectivity is significantly better than the UK.

At times like these, when most of us are reduced to working on the net, the critical importance of good connectivity for rural communities is being cruelly emphasised.

Good access can open up economic and educational opportunities and bring new life to declining communities. The UK has prioritised services to vulnerable areas like the Highlands and Islands, with very positive effects.

You have to fear for the future of rural life in the USA is this issue isn’t addressed.

[Edward John M]

To paraphrase something from a long time ago.
“there is no life in Upstate New York; just death and taxes”
My brother-in-law on my last visit to Binghamton
EDIT
For clarification I was having a moan about the internet dropping out all the time when trying to send pix home to Oz

[Kattt]

“Only the Federal government has the strength to do this.”

“Self-reliance.

Cheers”

 

Ok.

[Kattt]

@George

…and we are 30 miles, as the crow flies, from the hub of the world-Silicon Valley.

[jscott]

“…and we are 30 miles, as the crow flies, from the hub of the world-Silicon Valley.”

I look across S.F. bay and see a small sliver of the oil refineries at Richmond. They snake their way all through the valley there. It’s a major refining hub, taking in gas from ships from all over the world. And we pay the highest prices for gas in the country.

When ‘supply and demand’ doesn’t account for price, capitalists will just shrug and say ‘it’s whatever the market will bear’. When that fails, as with health care pricing, I guess they revert to ‘there will always be winners and losers.”

[Kattt]

“The market” isn’t allowed to compete with internet service here. Not even xfinity is allowed in our neck of the woods. One lousy service with no alternatives. Reminds me of DMV or the post office before they had to compete with FedEx and UPS.

[Kattt]

As far as the price of gasoline in the Bay Area and California in general, that’s because of taxes and environmental restrictions, which is fine by me. I don’t mind paying extra for that.

[Author]

Posts