Alf says “Stay at home”!
By Alf Kremer, KTCL FM | Hey everybody. I want to talk a bit about Covid-19… and science. No, science doesn’t “have all the answers”. But the main goal of science is to find as many answers as it possibly can. As a whole, science studies, observes, tests, and learns. The total sum of scientific knowledge increases day by day.
When Covid first began spreading, science didn’t know anything about it. We knew it was this certain type of disease, but that was about all that could be said with any certainty.
Not surprisingly, science began studying this new disease. We couldn’t run actual real-world tests to see how people actually caught it (naturally), so it involved finding the people who had it and trying to work backwards from that. At the start, there weren’t a lot of cases to use for data (and what data they had was confusing). But early on, it seemed the major method of transmission was by touch, perhaps from infected surfaces. You might remember that the first round of information we heard focused on that aspect. “Wash your hands frequently for twenty seconds.” “Don’t touch your face.” These advisories were made based on science’s first small group of data.
Science (sadly) has had a lot more data to work with recently. That may be the only real positive out of this. And so science has learned a bit more about Covid-19. There’s still a lot more to learn, but the picture has gotten a bit clearer.
It now appears that Covid-19 mostly spreads through the air, when an uninfected person is in close proximity with an infected person. It leaves via the infected person’s nose or mouth, via talking or a cough or whatnot, and enters the uninfected person’s mucus membranes (most often the nose or mouth). It appears that one might still get Covid-19 through an infected surface, but the belief is that that’s now a much less likely scenario.
Thus the shift in messaging to social distancing, and mask wearing.
Why social distancing? Well, think about cleaning your bathroom sink, with one of those bottles set to “spray”. You hold the spray bottle of cleanser several inches from the sink, pull the trigger and coat the sink with a layer of the cleanser. Now imagine yourself doing the same thing, but from six feet away. You’d have a big area getting hit by the cleanser, but there’s not much in any one spot – not enough to really do the job correctly. Social distancing works the same way. An uninfected person might still be “hit” by the infected person, but it would be diluted enough to make an infection far less likely.
…and that’s where the mask wearing comes in.
Wearing a mask over your mouth and nose creates an extra barrier between yourself and the virus. Even a simple bandana can reduce the chances of catching the virus. The better the mask, the better the protection.
Even more so, though, a mask worn by an infected individual will greatly reduce that person’s ability to spread the virus. This is especially critical because an infected person often goes days without having any symptoms whatsoever. (Science currently believes at least 25% of people who contract the virus never have any symptoms at all.) But during this phase, that person can still infect other people.
You may remember, back in the “don’t touch your face” portion of the outbreak, scientists were actually discouraging the wearing of masks. Were they wrong? Well, yeah, but no so much “wrong“ as “they didn’t have a good enough picture yet”. At that stage, it looked like surface transmission was the main culprit, so they focused their message on that. In addition, there was genuine concern that people would hoard medical-grade masks, leaving those in the medical field (who need it the most) without them.
Science does get the answers. But the scientific method usually involves rigorous research and testing, done under a multitude of conditions, done repeatedly until a very definite answer appears. The problem with that is that it takes time. If Covid were confined to a test tube, science could take their time and do that rigorous testing, and present the final answer in a decade or so.
We don’t have a decade. Too many people are contracting the illness to wait for full-on rigorous testing. So science is forced to announce preliminary results. “It looks like this is what’s happening.” “Early tests show that this is helpful.” It’s less rigorous, and less scientific, but it’s sort of necessary at this point.
The good news is that progress is getting made. Testing has found that a cheap, safe and readily-available steroid can reduce the severity of the illness in those most likely to suffer the worst from it. No, it’s not a “cure” by any means, but it’s a step in making the disease less deadly. I fully expect more of this sort of discovery as time goes on. And there’s even a chance a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. If so, that would be faster than any vaccine developed, by several YEARS.
But…until then, we’ve got this virus floating around. And it’s still a motherfucker. So what do you do?
I’ll repeat what I said in a previous post – ACT LIKE YOU HAVE THE VIRUS. Because you in fact might. And acting as if you do will slow the spread more than anything else you can do.
• Stay home as much as possible. This one is a no-brainer. The fewer people you interact with, the less chance you have to infect anybody else.
• Keep your circle small. We’re social creatures, and we like interaction. But if you go hang out with this group of friends…and then this other group of friends…and then this side of the family…you’re increasing the number of people you can infect. Not to hammer the point, but YOU MIGHT HAVE A DEADLY DISEASE, AND YOU MIGHT BE INFECTING EACH OF THESE FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEMBERS. If you’re going to interact with them…
• Practice social distancing. Stay at least six feet apart. Stay outside if you can – it appears Covid is harder to catch out-of-doors. You can get closer than six feet temporarily -getting situated or what have you – but your default position should be at least six feet apart.
• Wear a mask in public. Driving your car (alone), walking the dog – you’re provably fine without. But if you’re going somewhere where there will be interaction with others, wear a mask over your mouth and nose. Any mask is better than no mask, but see if you can get a better one. Clean your mask at the end of the day. (Ideally, have at least two so you can wear one while the other is drying.)
• Wash your hands at least 20 seconds, after any social interaction, after coming back home, any time you may have been exposed to anything. Again, this is no longer considered the primary source of contagion, but it’s still a good idea.
You no doubt have seen the heavy spikes in cases in several states. Unfortunately, Colorado looks like we might be right at the beginning of our own upturn as well. If so, the further reopening plans in the future will probably have to be curtailed, and we may have to walk back a step or two in previously-taken steps. The ONLY way to counteract this is to reduce the number of new daily cases. And science says the best way to do that is by taking the steps above. Many other countries have taken these steps, and they’ve reduced their new cases to almost a trickle. So they’re able to operate almost back to normal. If we’d like to do the same, science is telling us what to do.
Let’s do it.
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