Local news

[james_davis_nicoll]

Ontario is changing the Covid threat level for Waterloo Region from Plaid Badger to Umber Butterfly, and we all know what that means.

Comments

[frogworth]

...harder to... catch?

[leecetheartist]

I dunno, I understand that the Plaid Badger can be pretty feisty!

[ba_munronoe]

It's pretty simple if you understand the heraldic significance. Now, to begin with, the plaid badger was generally paired with a zebra-striped unicorn on a field vert, with the exception of the House of Tambling-Dicks-Goggin , which incorporated a bend sinister wavy umber...

[kathmandu]

Ow, my eyes!

[arethinn]

Here I'm wondering about the attitudes of the charges. Couchant? Rampant? Sejant erect contourné? Urinant (which turned out not to mean what immediately came sniggeringly to mind when I looked up a list to find some more unusual ones than the ones I could list off the top of my head, and which is not appropriate for these animals, but what the hell)?

[del]

In the Aubrey-Maturin books, Stephen buys a diving bell, and informs Jack that he is an urinator.

[(Anonymous)]

Looking this up:

Now Cinderella isn't the only person for whom the party ends at midnight.

And the bar closes at eleven.

From the United Kingdom we have had various number or colour schemes invented and scrapped, mostly by Boris Johnson for England. Also, acronyms. Now, England is in a lockdown except for schools, Wales is just out of a lockdown and has optimistically re-opened everything having apparently promised to, and Scotland got a scale of 0 to 4, mainly altering the number of people allowed to meet but if we get a 4 then they will close bars and hairdressers and ruin my plans for the weekend. 0 isn't normality and also isn't likely soon.

And our national terrorism threat level has been reset from Substantial to Severe, obliging us all to look up what difference that makes; apparently, none.

Robert Carnegie

[jessie_c]

Drug got into the good stuff?

[bunsen_h]

Um. Confusion gaze, tunnels through rock?

[graydon]

While I am entirely sympathetic to the disdain for Dougie's manifest and extensive incompetence, we do still know what it means, whatever label Dougie sees fit to stick on it.

It's an insidious threat. You have to presume everyone you meet is infected and infectious and just doesn't know it yet. Any amount of contact suffices for transmission. (More contact makes it more likely, but any amount will do.)

Don't leave the house without a clean mask on, and it stays on the entire time you're out there.

Leave the house by necessity and not preference. Rearrange things to limit your movement to the greatest possible extent. (It's an insidious threat with no current effective counter; if you're alive where you are, hold what you've got.)

Sanitise your hands. Only if you start to feel sticky -- you're degreasing your subcutaneous fat -- are you going too far. Switch to washing. Wash if there's anything on your hands. Wash for at least thirty seconds. This applies to any time you come in contact with outside, or anything that's been outside. (Fomite transmission risks are low; contact-contact risks are not low.)

Shared space is bad; talking is ten times worse. Singing, shouting, exercise, loud talking, chanting, cheering, etc. are fifty times worse. Outside isn't safe; it's safer, but safer isn't safe. Masks reduce your risk, but like any PPE they're an admission of failure; you had to get into a situation where you needed PPE. Stay out of the situation if you possibly can. If you can't, wear the mask. Wear a clean mask.

COVID is from a class of diseases that's worse in the winter as people are necessarily inside more. Just because it can spread in the summer because no one has any pre-existing immunity doesn't mean that it won't be worse in winter. We know you can catch it a second time. Act like it.

Success looks like the whole miserable effort was unnecessary, just like wearing your life jacket, switching off electrical supplies before doing work on wiring, shutting off the gas, and keeping your fingers out of the rotating machinery.

[(Anonymous)]

That was great!

I have just two questions: What do you mean by contact-contact risks? If the SARS-CoV-2 virus makes contact with soapy water, how long does it take to become inactivated?

I'm presuming you aren't an expert in any of the relevant fields (I'm happy to be wrong about that), but I'm interested in what you have to say. Thanks!

-- Eric

[(Anonymous)]

In the UK we're told to wash our hands with soap thoroughly and that that means for twenty seconds. Soap takes this particular virus apart extremely quickly, it's packaged in fat, but only when all of the virus hypothetically on your hands gets into contact with the soap. What to sing to yourself that reminds you to take twenty seconds is much argued about. "Staying Alive" is used for something else.

Hospital hand washing as far as I know goes further, specifically, up to the elbows.

Robert Carnegie

[arethinn]

I wash up to the elbows when I come home from grocery shopping because I have a tendency to lean my wrists or arms on the shopping cart.

I know "Staying Alive" is supposedy used to guide the tempo of chest compressions, but I don't see why you couldn't identify how much of the lyrics constituted 20-30 seconds and use it for handwashing, if that's your jam.

Back in the spring I saw some pretty amusing suggestions of how much of Lady Macbeth's speech you need to recite to make up the requisite time, and also that this would be a great context in which to say prayers of suitable length to Apollo Loemius (deliverer from plague).

[graydon]

A contact-contact risk is when your actions function to immediately move something wet (with virus into it) to one of your mucous membranes; for example, if someone across the bus isle sneezes, a droplet lands on your forehead, and you drag some of it into the corner of your eye trying to wipe it off.

Best available -- https://tinyurl.com/FAQ-aerosols -- summarises as "aerosols are much more a risk than any other form of transmission, but the others aren't negligible".

The point of soap isn't that it kills the virus; soap doesn't kill much of anything. The point with soap is that it's a surfactant that gets stuff off your hands, including whatever damp substance had the virus in it.

Alcohol hand sanitiser works pretty well for SARS-CoV-2[1]; the current advice says that if you stick the whole-hand coverage and thirty seconds with 70% alcohol or better that'll kill it. And in the winter especially sanitiser is generally easier on your hands; cracked skin is a major loss of defense against pathogens, so to be avoided.

[1] this is NOT a given with viruses; for example, Norwalk virus, aka Winter Vomiting Disease, sneers at hand sanitizers. (and a whole lot of other things!)

[ethelmay]

From the Guardian: "So why does soap work so well on the Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? The short story: because the virus is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. Soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and dies – or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive."

[graydon]

With the exception of a 5-min incubation with hand soap, no infectious virus could be detected after a 5-min incubation at room temperature (22°C).

That's from the Lancet Microbe but back in April, so maybe it's superseded. Absent someone having found much greater effectiveness for soap, while SARS-CoV-2 is susceptible to a whole lot of disinfects, soap is the last choice to actually kill it and the first choice to get all the bits of snot off your hands.

[(Anonymous)]

Excuse me, I just put (soap coronavirus wrong) into Google, and what I got is advice that soap does too kill many bacteria and viruses _if_ you wash your hands right. Not "People saying soap kills the coronavirus are wrong". Conceivably that important knowledge could be suppressed but I'm betting against it.

I will add that:

Not everything in the soap shelf at the supermarket is "soap". I looked. Actually I was looking for something not claiming "anti-bacterial", which may be a mistake since my "research" today says that all soap is anti-bacterial.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/what-is-soap-coronavirus.html
is what I mean by "research" but, it does say it's "Technology"!

This also describes a technical difference between real soap produced by "saponification", and synthetic detergent or "syndet" made otherwise. These are said to be equivalent in outcome anti-virally and otherwise, but I say don't wash your hands in clothes detergent or your hair with dishwashing liquid. Maybe you can, but I say don't. Hands in dishwashing liquid, I have done that. Usually though I am a hard soap guy (I thought), but I recently tried shower gel (I can't tell if it's soap now from the bottle, doesn't say), and I found products that are good to wash hair or body. Useful if you have a hairy body. It also says "Save water, turn off the tap", is that usual?

There's also stuff that states with pride "Contains no soap", which may just mean this is that "syndet" stuff (as explained at length, Dove is this) or may mean that you're actually buying fruit jelly in a different shaped jar. The bacteria probably are safe from you in that case. The more fruity, the less soapy, I think you'll find.

It says you can wash hands with it, you can wash hands with a hat on but it doesn't actually contribute to the process. That just leaves the water, which admittedly is deadly on its own in many places.

Robert Carnegie

Not 20 seconds

[felila]

20 seconds isn't enough if you aren't washing the right way. I have signs from the WHO posted next to the kitchen and bathroom sinks, showing just how to wash.

https://www.who.int/gpsc/clean_hands_protection/en/

I do this (plus forearms) and don't worry about time.