I went to the post office yesterday (home delivery isn't really a thing here, most people have PO boxes and stand in line to pick up packages). They've got tape on the floor showing the 6-foot intervals for standing in line and everybody was doing really well with that while I was in line.

While I was at the counter some people in line got too close together, and one of the PO workers shouted "Hey, break up the love fest! We're doing social distancing!" and everybody looked abashed and spread out again.

Meanwhile, I still have to go to work, and we all sit at cubicles a few feet from each other. 60+ people. Sighhh

They say "If you feel flu-like symptoms, use your PTO" (paid time off)

And there's absolutely no work to do. It's been so slow that I haven't been able to do a single work-related thing all week, yet I still have to come in.

Oof.

Hey fellas

anyone up?

yup

It's the middle of the day, so... yes.

Not in India

its 6AM here

[grin] We've got humans from all over, here.

@Akira_Kurusu I don't know how you've gotten away with nothing work-related... Hopefully you get a call or a chat or something tomorrow

(for the record, he and I are co-workers)

@JaideepstandswithMonica o/

I've got a friend who's due to give birth in July, and is worried about how to be responsible and safe about it, both in terms of burdening the medical system and in case she has to give birth at home because the medical system's unable to help her at the time. Does anyone have constructive resources or recommendations I can pass on to her, please?

@BESW Emailed a friend who's done it at home five times--will let you know what I hear.

Thanks!

...we will survive...

@jkerian Actually, it is an absolute law of evolution. Thankfully! Any virus that kills its host too soon will die out because it won't be able to spread across the population. Which is why particularly lethal viruses such as Ebola are not very likely to cause pandemics. They are far, far easier to contain because the time between first infection and death is very short, so hosts die before they can spread it very far.

It's absolute in a sense, yes. Not necessarily on the level of a single virus or a limited strain which might be a fluke, but for hosts that generally consider their dead to be contaminated and avoid engaging with them, it's close enough to absolute in terms of "what it should converge to"

It's definitely not absolute if the virus's host is some animal that routinely eg. eats dead animals of its kind.

(Although I am not a biologst, so don't take anything I say it as a fact)

@kviiri I am, with a focus on comparative evolution and genomics, although not virology. But it's really simple: viruses need living cells in order to reproduce. If a virus kills its host too soon, then it will be impossible for it to spread fast. Dead bodies won't be infectious for very long, as the cells die so the viruses in them are destroyed.

The details will depend on how long the virus can be viable outside a living cell, of course, but any virus that kills too fast is far less scary than one that does it slowly.

Oh wow, I didn't mean to suggest that you should take anything I say as fact just because I'm a biologist! I might understand some of the underlying science, yes, but I'm not a virologist or an epidemiologist either.

@terdon will we survive?

@skullpatrol No. All humans die ;)

Indeed.

@terdon Ah, right. Makes sense, viruses are less capable of living off a cadaver than many other things

models of extreme parasites

@kviiri Which is why it's always annoyed me how zombie movies keep insisting on using "viruses" dammit! :)

Make it any other kind of pathogen and it just might work!

"organisms at the edge of life"

@terdon I think I've read some otherwise really cruddy speculative fiction that got this bit right and made it a fungus instead

@skullpatrol Yeah, it's a perennial discussion whether viruses are truly alive or not. I say it depends on how alive you need for a given context x) and ultimately, things are what they are, and "aliveness" is just a social construction

schrodinger's cat is also "at the edge of life"

my SO's grandmother insisted that stones are alive

this was a part of a discussion on whether sterilizing spices by irradiation is safe or not

@BESW The obgyn departments of hospitals of my projects are still operating. They span the range of tier 1 emergency centers down to community hospitals. The dual clinical/research staff have been switch over to full time clinical duties.

@kviiri Not for the microbes in the spices! A lot of things are sterilized by irradiation. The industrial sized cobalt irradiators used for those applications are pretty interesting.

@skullpatrol Schrodinger's Cat is very dangerous.

@AbhasKumarSinha why?

welcome back, pal

@BESW Never heard about such thing before... Does that happen too?

@skullpatrol Pal, I missed you a lot !

:-)

@skullpatrol Let's go to AI Chatroom and discuss what happened in the meantime.

I have to go out and my wife's making me wear an N-95 grade mask, gloves, etc

I don't think gloves are a bad idea but, IIRC, masks are more for reducing the chances that you infect someone else than vice-versa.

And gloves only make sense inasmuch as they remind you not to touch your nose, mouth and eyes. If you wear gloves and keep scratching your nose, there's no point at all.

the nose, mouth, and eyes are the big three entry points

@terdon I suppose it depends on how the virus survives on surfaces.

@Yuuki Why? No matter how long it survives, if you wear gloves and scratch your nose, it's exactly the same as not wearing gloves and scratching your nose.

This is a good study on how long it survives, by the way (very technical though):

nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

It can be crudely summarized as:

Good guy copper <3

But those are the numbers for how long the virus is detectable which isn't necessarily the same as how long it is present at high enough levels to still be infectious.

Nevertheless, it's a helpful rule of thumb.

@kviiri I believe I've seen it reasoned that the move away from brass door handles has increased infectious transmission rates, historically

@Carcer I remember when I came up with the idea, as a teen, that "hey if copper is so great at killing germs why don't we make door handles out of it" and then the teacher tells me that that's what hospitals actually do.

I was thinking of sheathing my door handles with cardboard, but 24 hours is still a bit long so if the virus gets in it's not likely to help any. OTOH the 24 hours is the approximate time to reach (measured) zero, and it'll still decay faster and be less likely to infect me than the plain steel handle... but I doubt the difference is really the best thing I could do to protect my house

garden DIY type places may sell adhesive copper strip things

they're normally for discouraging slugs from climbing plant pots

@kviiri It isn't. At all. Just... wash your hands when you get home.

just cover everything you own in adhesive copper strips

that sounds practical

I don't know, but I suspect that the persistence of the virus on the rather soft and porous copper strips will not be at all the same as on actual metal surfaces anyway.

@terdon I am not a germophobe but I can't help thinking about the virions I leave in my flat between the door and the sink... but of course, 100% certainty'd be a bit too much to ask right?

@kviiri Yes, but also you're very unlikely to be leaving anything. The world isn't covered in 2m deep layers of viruses after all.

@terdon I wonder what that'd even look like

The idea is that I might have it, I scratch my nose and then place a hand against something which you later touch, so now you have something on your hands. if you wash your hands and don't touch your mucus membranes until you do, you should be fine.

But to be clear, I specifically mean door handles and the like. Things that I touch normally when at home, as well as when entering but before washing my hands

@kviiri Dust :)

But on the bright side, the epidemic has also gotten me to be considerably less face-touchy so that's an added safety factor.

@kviiri Yeah, the danger there is someone else has touched your door handle so you might pick something up, right? Well, if you have, in order to actually be infected, you need to touch your mucous membranes (nose, mouth, eyes, other less easily accessible things). If you don't, and just walk straight to the bathroom and wash your hands, your risks are minimal. Far less than crossing the street.

how does this virus compare to HIV in terms of deadliness?

@skullpatrol HIV today or HIV 20 years ago? HIV for someone who has access to the best treatment or for someone in countries where they might not have it or are required to actually pay for treatment? It isn't a very useful comparison, to be honest.

@terdon I (mildly) fear that infected people have been touching the surfaces of my home by proxy (my hands), yes

HIV doesn't kill you, anyway. It juse makes you easily killed.

right

@Carcer Sure, but you could say the same about falling off a cliff ;)

Although tbh I have no idea how well how COVID-19 or viruses in general transfer from "surface to surface". Eg if I touch a contaminated surface on a subway, how contaminated will the surfaces on my home be if I touch them without washing my hands. That probably depends a lot on how long the intermediary period is

I don't think we know, but it's reasonable to assume that each step will decrease the viral load transferred.

can it be compared to H1N1?

Yes, and it has. If I remember correctly (and I may well be wrong) H1N1 had a much higher case fatality rate, but was much less easily transmitted.

hmm

cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html

Thing is, we really don't know what the case fatality rate for Covid-19 is. It could still turn out to be far lower than we fear, but we won't know until 1) we actually test the population at large and 2) develop an antibody test that can tell us if someone has had it as opposed to the current test that can only tell us if someone has it now.

This is a good explanation of the data issues:

statnews.com/2020/03/17/…

But should be read along with this response to it which clarifies that despite not being sure, we damn well better take measures anyway:

statnews.com/2020/03/18/…

worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/…

look at MERS^

Yes. I may well have been thinking of MERS instead of H1N1 above.

ok

However, the most important datum in that page is the asterisk.

right

We simply do not know the mortality rate of Covid-19.

yet

I'm going to interrupt this civil conversation to post an english translation of a meme that's been making rounds

In fact, a very interesting approach, taken in one of the articles I linked to above, is to use the princess whatshername vessel to calculate since there we know that all people got the infection at more or less the same time.

Using that, the mortality rate could be significantly lower than 1%

That's the only case where we know that everyone was tested so we can know exactly what happened.

> The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

interesting

@kviiri lol

that population presumably also had immediate medical treatment available for anyone who had a serious case

ideal conditions that will not necessary hold in the general case.

@skullpatrol Apparently, up to 50% of infected people might not ever have any symptoms. So unless you test the population at large, you simply cannot know what percentage of infections lead to death.

@Carcer I doubt it. They were on a ship.

@terdon It's somewhat morbid but still fascinating when we get these almost-perfect microcosms for study

it is, yes

@terdon They were quarantined, and they could get people off it into hospitals if they got real bad

I don't know whether anyone actually required that treatment, though.

I might also suspect that the population who go on cruise ships are self-selected for people who are a bit more active and healthy to begin with

@Carcer I would suspect very much the opposite.

They tend to be older and less active (cruises aren't exactly active)

@terdon my calibration for what people enjoy is probably pretty bad.

why do they call it "novel"

it just means "new"

a novelty virus

well the novelty has worn off for me

@skullpatrol It was a placeholder name, for when it was still a recent discovery

@terdon Yeah, in light of recent research, it appears that the (proportional) death rate in much of the Western world (where you generally need to have some symptom to be tested) should be at least halved

@kviiri it looks like it has an "official" name now

HIV is the virus that causes AIDS

@skullpatrol Because it's like something out of a book. /s

@skillpatrol yuh

True

Coronavirus Chat Zone

COVID-19

or

SARS-CoV-2

officially ^that is what kills

It is still a coronavirus, so the name is not really wrong, and I can't be bothered to change it

Some jokester might try discussing the original SARS here... I wouldn't mind honestly as long as it was polite :-)

politeness is key