So the classic illness seems to be resiratory but I’ve also seen heart problems (Eduardo Rodriguez;Boston Red Sox) and reports of lingering effects on the brain.
Breathing it in thru the nose seems to be what most are concerned about. I assume one could breathe it in thru the mouth as well…my guess is less effectively since it could possibly stop inside the mouth. Can you get it from swallowing it or would it pass thru your system safely.
Eyes have been mentioned as another entrance point. Would it then have to make its way thru the bloods stream to the lungs?
All this is lead up to my real interest…how can you get it via contact with a contaminated surface? That seemed to be more of a concern in the beginning until masks became the main focal point. There were charts showing how long the virus could live on various surfaces. I think that some of those have changed since they were first published.
So if I touch the virus how likely is that I would get it by transferring it to my mustache and later breathing it in…or putting it on my tongue…or any other way.
I am not a doctor. But my understanding is that initially it was thought to spread like a cold, which is to say, through large respiratory droplets and debris on hands. Those are heavy enough that they fall to a surface shortly after being expelled. So they are mostly spread via close contact (that’s where the “3 feet” came from) and from the surfaces onto which the droplets landed.
You catch a cold that gets on your hand by touching your face. And that doesn’t really mean “your face”, it really means rubbing your nose, or touching your eyes, or wiping your mouth. That it, via the mucus membranes.
It now seems that this virus spreads more effectively via smaller droplets that stay afloat longer in the air.
I haven’t actually seen any studies showing it ISN’T spread via contaminated surfaces, nor via food, for that matter. And the cell receptor the virus uses to enter a cell in your nose is also abundant in the gut. So I’m really surprised there hasn’t been more research into this. Or maybe there has been but it’s been boring, and hasn’t made the popular press. I’d love to see it, if it exists.
How it enters the body and what it does once it gets there don’t have to be the same. Covid seems to enter the body via the mucus membranes, but it does a lot of its damage by attacking blood vessels, not just in the lungs, but also in the kidney, heart, and brain. It also can affect the gut directly and it often causes gastrointestinal problems.
It’s airborne. Which means as summer wanes and more people go indoors and they send kids and workers back into sealed buildings in huge numbers the infection rates are likely to go through the roof. The virus spreads through the air and HVAC systems recycle air like nobody’s business. That guy coughing two rooms away might as well be Frenching you for all the protection the space between is giving. Look around, count the air ducts, that’s how many places you’re getting virus blown at you.
Naw, the only air ducts blowing at me are attached to my home AC, and the odds that the other people in my home have covid are pretty low. Also, those ducts will completely stop blowing air in the fall, when it gets cool enough to stop using the AC.
(Yeah, I know you are talking in general.)
But more seriously, I read that article, and while I’m completely convinced that the most common means of transmission is via breathing virus-laden air, I don’t see any evidence that it’s not ALSO spread by hands and food. And while there’s an absence of evidence, I don’t think they know how transmittal happened in the vast majority of cases.
There was a case in Germany, early, when they were tracking how it originally got into Germany that seems to have been spread by a salt shaker.
A salt shaker that someone at a workplace cafeteria asked the guy at the table behind him to lend him, to be exact. IOW, people who were sitting fairly close together in an indoor space for a while, breathing the same air, and had a brief conversation with each other, and who might also have had mutual coworkers who were asymptomatic carriers (a possibility that wasn’t really on anyone’s radar at the time). So it’s really hard to tell whether the salt shaker was really the culprit or not (and I suspect this is one of the reasons why nobody, even now, is really sure whether to worry about surfaces or not – usually when people are touching the same objects, there are other plausible routes of transmission as well).
Those are all good points regarding the limits of observational studies. But we have animal models. I don’t understand why the basic research of testing animals to see if they can catch it from contaminated food or toys hasn’t been done. (Or hasn’t been widely published if it has been done.)
I have read one study on the efficacy of putting mask material between hamster cages (or maybe it was some other small animal) and a side effect of that study is that it clearly showed that the virus can be spread by air from one cage of animals to another.
Wouldn’t it be easy to feed a cage of hamsters contaminated feed and see what happens? Or spray an exercise wheel with the virus, let it dry, and put it in the cage? I would love to see the results of those studies.
I think my biggest concern here is people going back to work in offices and thinking that maintaining social distancing and keeping their hands off their face is going to work when in fact that air conditioning system that every building has, along with the windows that can’t be opened, is what’s going to kill them. Schools especially, those kids are crammed in like sardines, mask use will be dodgy AF and their grubby little hands go EVERYWHERE. And sure, kids don’t get sick of the 'rona as readily as adults do, but they’re awesome little asymptomatic carriers busily carting their virus loads home with them and when they do get sick it tends to be very bad for them. This reopening fervor is going to kill a lot of people.
I’ve been back up at work a little (school) and one thing I am noticing there and on zoom calls is people are pretty universally taking masks off when they are by themselves in their office. And these are people that believe in masks and are, in their own heads, compliant. I won’t go into our front office: it’s four little tiny boxes with a front reception area. No windows. In fact, outside is many doors and twisty hallways away. All 4 offices have a perfectly nice person in them, but I have seen that they only wear masks when two are in one little office, like to consult. Otherwise, they lower them. And I get it: they were told masks are to stop you from breathing droplets on others, to catch coughs. But I think that office is potentially a soup. It’s almost comical to put on a mask when someone steps in, when the whole room is full of everything you’ve exhaled for 6 hours.
The recommendation is to open “minimum outdoor air dampers, as high as 100%, thus eliminating recirculation”. This will impact the efficiency of systems, as the outside air has to be cooled or heated more than the inside air does, and some systems may not be able to keep up in extreme conditions. What it should do is lower the amount of circulating virus in the air, because that air is dumped outside and fresh air is brought in.
Based on those guidelines, my university is adjusting their air handling systems to improve building ventilation. Other buildings should be doing the same thing.
[quote=“puzzlegal, post:2, topic:917645, full:true”]
… nor via food, for that matter. And the cell receptor the virus uses to enter a cell in your nose is also abundant in the gut. [/quote]
AIUI, the virus particles are mostly destroyed by stomach acid & the digestive processes. So a virus particle would have to make it unscathed through the stomach acid & gut churning to reach a cell receptor in the lower gut – possible, but seems pretty unlikely. And so far, I haven’t seen any actual case of infection from this method. (But, as you said, most patients have no idea how they got infected.)
Agree with what’s been said so far - air transmission seems to be more accepted than surface transmission. That’s not to say getting it from a surface is not possible, just less likely than getting it thru the air. Closed, climate-controlled spaces with a bunch of people seem to be the most risky, followed by outdoor areas with lots of people in close quarters.
I remember at first people were handling their mail with gloves and quarantining their mail and Amazon packages for a few days before opening. I don’t think that is considered necessary any more. Also disinfecting grocery items may make people feel safer but not sure that is doing anything to prevent the virus from entering someone’s home.
Regarding your first paragraph: I’ve come to a different conclusion after looking at probably similar data that you have. It appears to me that publicly-touched surfaces (fomites) are close to being cleared of a role in COVID-19 transmission. Maybe not 100% ruled out, but if pressed I’d put it at 99.9999% ruled out.
Regarding your second paragraph: I think you’ve made an important point. COVID-19 is too often treated as strictly a respiratory illness and thus gets mentally lumped in with influenza and the like … and thus to minimize the potential public health threat. It’s starting to look like that in spite of the common symptom of blood clots in the lungs … COVID-19 is hardly a respiratory infection at all – rather, it’s a circulatory-system infection. I see a lot of information out there that indicates that the medical establish at large is well aware of this, and such awareness seems to be leading to more effective immediate-term treatment of those presenting with severe symptoms.
In a thread on blood donations, someone said it’s not blood-borne (which made no sense to me; how is the virus getting from the lungs to the brain or gut without traveling in the bloodstream?).
I wish the virus would just make up its mind for our convenience. All these new bits of info are kind of irritating.
COVID-19 is indeed airborne, but I haven’t yet seen anything supporting that HVAC-circulated air in itself is a vector for infection. Rather, indoor air has to exchanged with some frequency to help disperse any aerosols that may have been exhaled by an infected person. So you do want air-conditioned indoor air after all … but you also want it well-filtered, and ideally you want some exchange with the outside air. You also want to be aware of any indoor spaces that are air “dead zones”, where air tends to circulate poorly or “collect” despite the efforts of the HVAC system.
I think it’s the “should be” part that trips me up–people “should be” wearing masks and “should be” social distancing and “should be” staying home as much as possible but obviously they are not doing what they “should be” doing. I’m foreseeing a lot of people in charge of buildings either ignoring those guidelines or abandoning them when their power bill goes up because that’s human nature for you. I mean, who gives a shit that a few dozen people die so long as the company saves money on its energy bills? If the person in charge of these decisions is a science disbeliever the risk factors increase considerably. Just too many negative factors in play to keep the trust level up on this one. People are gonna die. A lot.
To be clear – COVID-19 manifests as infection of the blood vessel walls themselves. Organs rich in vascularity (lungs, brain, etc.) will often be affected.
I note that serological tests for COVID-19 detect antibodies to COVID-19, but not virus particles themselves. This might be meaningful, but I am not sure.
Complete tangent: influenza, a disease mostly of epithelial cells in the lungs, respiratory tract, and intestines, is too often treated as strictly a respiratory illness…