Are you scared? : (

[JanuarySwan]

52 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

You may not need to do all the cleaning you've set out for yourself, but if it's making you feel better, have at it!

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain everything as you did.  I understood some of it but am also reading about viruses and there are a lot of words I do not understand because I am a layman.

As far as cleaning, yes...it gave me some peace of mind.  I feel my lifestyle will be forever changed from this experience.  I think I will be cleaner, at least.

Mold yuk!  It could be part industrial pollution collecting there too possibly...like carbon soot perhaps from cars.  I've heard of household germs but I thought those mostly came from meat.  Cleaning after touching meat is so important.  

To address the OP:  The world shutting down like it has is scary, too...along with all the unknowns to me.   

[Da5id Weatherwax]

7 hours ago, Tripp Plunkett said:

Mostly preventable. Pressure cooker and mason jars. I've personally eaten fruits that had been canned for over 13+ years. Entirely possible to can meats also though I am not sure how long shelf-life would be. Unsure how to can? duckduckgo is your friend. (Just don't let your pressure cooker explode.)

smoke it, make it into jerky, pickle it, salt it, can it, blanche and freeze it, puree it and can that, jam it, dehydrate it, cook it and freeze the meals, boil down bones for stock...

All these things that nobody seems to know how to do any more. Hell, my mother doesn't know how to do most of them, I learned from my grandmas, both now long gone.

Anything in my fridge or larder that isn't going to keep, I'll make something out of it that will keep before it has to be thrown away. I hate wasting food, it's disrespectful.

[Beth Macbain]

Are you washing your hands the Alton way? Ain’t no shortage of bar soap AFAIK.

 

[Pamela Galli]

Love this social distancing party! 

 

 

 

Edited March 29, 2020 by Pamela Galli

[Lindal Kidd]

11 hours ago, JanuarySwan said:

Sorry to hear about the trials and stress lots are dealing with!

If anyone could help with my following questions, I'd appreciate it very much.

***************

1)  In layman's terms and in the short version where and how do viruses start?

2)  I have questions and concerns about my air-conditioner/heating unit.  I cleaned out my air conditioner and heating unit as when I looked in it it was full of growths and crud and what looks like mold (I googled images of mold in air conditioners and that's what it looked like).  I cleaned it thoroughly as best I could.  I've cleaned most of my home with a good old-fashioned bucket of soap and water and drying everything as well and then threw all of the cloths away.  I did sanitize whatever I touch often like cell phone, handles, etc.  But, I wanted to know is there any possibility virus cells can grow in a place like my air-conditioner/heating unit with mold and whatever else the "crud" was?  Does my air-conditioner and heating unit have a potential to making me sick?  And, if so...sick from what?   Is it time to ask a service person or just change it?  There was nothing wrong with the working of it...it just has growths of some kind in there....maybe mold and something else.  

Great questions, January...and Maddy gave some great answers.  I'm an engineer, not a biologist, but here are my (imperfect) comments on it...

Viruses are very strange things.  Scientists have argued for many years about even the most basic question about them:  Are they alive?  One of the most basic qualities of living things is that they grow and reproduce.  Viruses don't grow.  They don't feed on anything.  They don't have a metabolism.  They reproduce...but they can't do it without help.  As far as we know, viruses have been around for millions of years.

They are very, very small.  You can't see them, even with a laboratory grade optical microscope.  (You CAN see bacteria ("germs") with a microscope).  If you enlarged a human hair so that its width covered a football field, a virus particle enlarged to the same scale would be about four inches across.

A virus doesn't even have DNA, like cells do.  What they do have is RNA, and a protein shell studded with other protein molecules.  Those are the little "spikes" you see in pictures of the coronavirus.  They're very important.

Those little protein spikes have a specific shape that is different for each type of virus.  Their shape can match up to and "stick" to other protein receptors on the surface of cells...but ONLY receptors of exactly the correct shape.  This is why viruses that can infect dogs usually can't infect humans.  It's also why just getting coronavirus particles on your skin does not mean you will get sick...if you wash them off before you touch your nose or mouth.  The coronavirus is evolved specifically to be able to stick to respiratory cells (now, I mean.  Before last year, it could only infect bats*...then it mutated and became able to infect humans.  This is why it's called a "novel" coronavirus.  It's "novel" in the sense that it's a new strain.)

Once a virus encounters a cell it can attach to, it grabs on and sinks into the cell.  There, its outer coating dissolves, releasing its RNA payload.  The RNA hijacks the cell's normal reproductive machinery, and it basically gets the cell to turn into a factory for making more virus particles.  Soon the cell is chock full of virus particles and it breaks down, releasing them to find other cells and repeat the process.  In an amazingly short time, your body has so many virus particles in it that you start to "shed" them...shooting them out into the air when you sneeze or cough.  At the same time, your body has been mobilizing its defenses.  White blood cells rush to attack infected cells (not the virus particles themselves).  All this cellular activity raises your body temperature; you feel feverish.

Viruses that are out in the open have a rough time of it.  They must find a cell they can infect, or they won't be around very long.  This is because, being so very tiny, they are vulnerable to being damaged by many things...oxygen, ultraviolet light (like in sunlight!), heat, cold, chemicals.  They don't have anything like the redundancy of a multicelled organism, and they have no self-repair capability, being so simple.  Once they are sufficiently degraded by any of these things, they are no longer...well, alive.  If we can call it that.  In any case, their molecular structure no longer is such that they can do their job of attacking a living cell.

This is why the things the medical folks have told us to do work.  Washing your hands works because alcohol or soap destroys the virus particles, and water washes them off, before you can convey them to your nose or mouth.  Disinfecting surfaces works because alcohol or bleach or soap destroys the virus particles.  Social distancing works because it lessens the chance that a touch, or a tiny airborne droplet from a cough will cause virus particles to reach a part of you (your nasal membranes and throat) where they can survive and reproduce.

They are also the ONLY tools we have right now.  For other viruses, there are vaccines.  A vaccination causes your body to develop antibodies against a specific sort of virus**.  Then, when that virus does get into you, the antibodies quickly find and destroy it.  But we won't have a vaccine against this virus for many months yet.  While vaccines are the main way we fight viruses, in recent years it's been found that there are some medicines that can be therapeutic against specific viruses, for example remdesivir has been used against Ebola and MERS.  Scientists are conducting trials with several possible medicines to see if any of them help.  You've probably heard that chloroquine, or hydrochloroquine, (Plaquenil) might help.  Those are medicines that are sometimes used against malaria, and some other diseases.  Their use in combating THIS disease is NOT YET proven, and nobody should be taking them for it.  They have some potentially serious side effects.

*Why aren't bats killed by it?  Because bats have one heck of a good immune system.  They can HAVE the virus, but their immune system keeps it in check, so they don't get sick from it.

**Getting sick from a virus and recovering does the same thing.  This why, in most cases, once you have had a viral disease, you can't catch it again.  You have developed antibodies against that virus.  Vaccination does the same thing, but without making you sick.  An exception is a virus that mutates very rapidly.  You catch a cold.  When you recover, you are immune to that particular cold virus...but not the mutated version that comes around and gets you next year.  Influenza viruses also mutate rapidly, which is why you need a fresh flu shot every year.  That year's vaccine is specific to the strain of the flu that scientists think is most likely to be infecting folks next flu season.

[Lindal Kidd]

I found this great 3D image.  It's of an influenza virus, but it clearly shows the "spikes", the protein shell, and the RNA coiled up inside.

[Cindy Evanier]

I wish we could blast this spammer

[Maryanne Solo]

Scared? 😳😢 

 

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

A virus doesn't even have DNA, like cells do.  What they do have is RNA...

It's a geekily fascinating topic: viruses can be categorized according to how they use RNA and DNA to replicate. A notable example is the retrovirus category (e.g., HIV) that carries its genetic material in RNA form but transcribes it into DNA in the cell and tricking the cell's own machinery into producing the replicas. There are also viruses that use DNA to carry their genetic material, but it's true that most viruses are RNA-based.

Overall, this plague has revealed how interesting microbiology would have been as a career. Also epidemiology... although I gotta say: we social scientists felt ever so sorry for ourselves, dealing with messy data. We had no idea how messy data could be, how scrambled-up and self-confounding and sampling-contaminated and yet existentially important. 

[Blaise Glendevon]

56 minutes ago, Cindy Evanier said:

I wish we could blast this spammer

Is there a block feature on this forum? I have desperately been trying to find it, but it's not in the usual places. 

[Cindy Evanier]

1 minute ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

Is there a block feature on this forum? I have desperately been trying to find it, but it's not in the usual places. 

hover over the name and ignore user

its not perfect but better than nothing

[Blaise Glendevon]

1 minute ago, Cindy Evanier said:

hover over the name and ignore user

its not perfect but better than nothing

Excellent! Thanks.

[Marigold Devin]

On 3/26/2020 at 4:55 PM, Beth Macbain said:

We now have a hotline number to call or text to report people or businesses who aren't following the rules. Does England not have a tattle line yet? 

Kentucky might be at the bottom of the list for pretty much everything, but we love our basketball and competition sports, and with those taken away we're looking at flattening the curve as a competition now. We're out to beat other states... if that means narcing on each other, so be it. We're damned determined we're going to win this thing. 

If anyone needs a little humor in this mess, our governor has turned into a God, and there is a huge FB group for memes about him. Other states (and countries) have joined in and are trying to barter for our governor and it's quite entertaining. Sorry, He's Taken

 

Our nark line has now appeared, as fully anticipated. Well, not a phone line as such, but the Police website here has a form to fill in if anyone in the UK suspects friends/family/neighbours are breaking the current rules regarding staying isolated. 

 

Edited March 29, 2020 by Marigold Devin
original far too long and emo

[Drayke Newall]

On 3/29/2020 at 2:39 AM, LittleMe Jewell said:

The extrapolated meaning of that is that the chance of death, taken as a whole, is less that the figures we've seen thrown out there.  The death rate percentage is based on the number of cases known to be positive - not the total number of actual infected people.

Until exact numbers are known it is still a little hard to talk about death rates etc. I read this article today which seriously puts a very large question mark (despite many people probably not being surprised) to the official death count. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8165717/Locals-Wuhan-believe-42-000-people-died-coronavirus.html

tl;dr: basically locals in china have been getting the cremation urns delivered to them (before a specific Chinese holiday) of those that have been cremated due to having the virus and apparently in Wuhan alone according to local sources, now that the area has re-opened and word is getting out, it is estimated that 40k have died in that area alone. Hankou town received 5000 urns in one day according to the local Chinese media there, meaning that town just by itself has almost doubled the officially declared China Statistics.

Unfortunately what we have seen in Italy, this figure may well be the true impact the virus is having.

I think its good that the western world is locking down and putting restrictions on well before China did and hopefully this will help which it seems to be, however I am still more concerned about countries like India whereby the slums and sheer population of India would be a breeding ground and could see many, many dead, many more go un-noticed with the potential of re-spreading to the western world if it isn't contained there. Potentially prolonging all of the restrictions we have in place now.

[Lindal Kidd]

Drayke, I saw a similar article that claimed that deaths in the USA are being under-reported too.  Front line workers are saying the number of deaths they're seeing are not reflected in the published numbers.  This could be simply because of delays in the reporting chain, but it could also be the (understandable) desire of governments to not let anyone know how bad a job they're doing.

We may never have numbers we can trust, for any aspect of this.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Drayke, I saw a similar article that claimed that deaths in the USA are being under-reported too.  Front line workers are saying the number of deaths they're seeing are not reflected in the published numbers.  This could be simply because of delays in the reporting chain, but it could also be the (understandable) desire of governments to not let anyone know how bad a job they're doing.

We may never have numbers we can trust, for any aspect of this.

There are American journalists in China. If the numbers are seriously out-of-whack, I think that'll eventually come to light. My neighbor recently went on a rant about astronauts aboard the ISS sighting plumes of sulfur laden smoke emanating from the Wuhan area, fed by piles of dead bodies in fields. A quick visit to Snopes showed the article originated in one of Rupert Murdoch's gossip rags and has been debunked.

Meanwhile, I've just been notified that the 3D fabrication machine I purchased from a Kickstarter project will arrive ahead of schedule because the Chinese factory making it came back online earlier and faster than expected. As amusing as it is to imagine my machine being built by corpses, its physical arrival ahead of schedule will lead me to believe otherwise.

My neighbor also put a number to the Chinese deception, claiming that 42 million had died. In light of Drayke's article link, I'm going to chalk this up to the meaningless of decimal position to people who are ignorant of basic facts. There are a lot of us!

Edited March 30, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[LittleMe Jewell]

29 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

We may never have numbers we can trust, for any aspect of this.

This is very likely the truth.  

I read this morning that Japan's numbers are spiking now that the Games have been officially postponed.  Apparently it has "raised questions in parliament and among citizens about whether Japan understated the extent of the outbreak and delayed enforcement of social distancing measures". 

I definitely think that the figures there were purposely under-reported in the hope that they could prevent the Games from being postponed.

[Pamela Galli]

On 3/29/2020 at 2:07 AM, Cindy Evanier said:

I wish we could blast this spammer

I don’t see the spammer, but I noticed a few days ago one disappeared in another thread that I hadn’t bothered to report (because didn’t want to burden mods). So I think the mods are on the ball. 

[Cindy Evanier]

10 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

I don’t see the spammer, but I noticed a few days ago one disappeared in another thread that I hadn’t bothered to report (because didn’t want to burden mods). So I think the mods are on the ball. 

there was one yesterday that took a while to be removed.  There was another one a couple of hours ago that was gone within 10 minutes of us reporting.  

[Lindal Kidd]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

...Meanwhile, I've just been notified that the 3D fabrication machine I purchased from a Kickstarter project will arrive ahead of schedule because the Chinese factory making it came back online earlier and faster than expected. As amusing as it is to imagine my machine being built by corpses, its physical arrival ahead of schedule will lead me to believe otherwise...

You're getting a 3D printer!?  I am hiding this post from the Resident Geek.  He's been nattering on about getting one.  With the stories about people using them to make medical PPE and valves for ventilators, I'm even starting to think he might have something there.

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

You're getting a 3D printer!?  I am hiding this post from the Resident Geek.  He's been nattering on about getting one.  With the stories about people using them to make medical PPE and valves for ventilators, I'm even starting to think he might have something there.

I already have one 3D printer. This has a head for printing, a head for machining/engraving, and a head for laser etching/cutting.

https://snapmaker.com/platform/

I've seen entry level printers and laser etchers for less than $200.

Edited March 30, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[Lindal Kidd]

I got that snapmaker kickstarter offer too.  We passed on it when the Resident Geek did some research into Snapmaker's previous machine and also into others.  He thinks the Ender3 would be the best choice.  I must admit, though, that the interchangeable toolhead looks cool.

Oh...another aspect of this.  While doing his research, the Geek found some YouTube vids about guys who'd made their own CNC routers by using their 3D printer to make a lot of the parts for it.  He got really excited about that...getting a new toy to make parts for another new toy!

Edited March 30, 2020 by Lindal Kidd

[Maryanne Solo]

For those interested in 3d printing, if I may....
Polyjet technology is the only current tech that reliably prints to 16 microns. My research is not fully up to date though.
Stratasys specialise in this tech.
Not sure about Hewlett Packards Multi Jet Fusion but it sure beats FDM, SLS or Mimaki Full Color UV Curable Inkjet.
I've been using it since late 2016.
I don't own a Stratasys machine - yet. I might sell some body parts and get one. 😹
I am willing to stand  corrected in what I say. There are many people much smarter than I here. 🤔

Edited March 30, 2020 by Maryanne Solo
typo

[Drayke Newall]

8 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

There are American journalists in China. If the numbers are seriously out-of-whack, I think that'll eventually come to light. My neighbor recently went on a rant about astronauts aboard the ISS sighting plumes of sulfur laden smoke emanating from the Wuhan area, fed by piles of dead bodies in fields. A quick visit to Snopes showed the article originated in one of Rupert Murdoch's gossip rags and has been debunked.

The issue here is that it is supposedly Chinese investigative journalists that have published the data along with photo evidence of it. https://wearechange.org/more-evidence-china-is-lying-number-of-urns-more-than-double-reported-coronavirus-deaths/

What is more prudent is that they had to secretly investigate it by photos and talking to the truck driver to confirm the numbers. Western media have even phoned the same funeral homes and have been told mysteriously "that they either did not have that data or were not authorized to disclose it". Given the places would certainly know how many urns they ordered as it is an inventory issue, one can only presume the later which is a red flag.

Regarding your cremation conspiracy theory, yes I agree no sulfur increase happened and Snopes are right, but you must also take into account that the very same articles they have mentioned also stated credible source informants from the crematoriums stating that they are burning 24 hours 7 days and cant keep up with the amount of bodies being delivered. Interestingly, Snopes never mentioned that in the debunk, which one would assume they either cant debunk it or it is truth.

Quote

Meanwhile, I've just been notified that the 3D fabrication machine I purchased from a Kickstarter project will arrive ahead of schedule because the Chinese factory making it came back online earlier and faster than expected. As amusing as it is to imagine my machine being built by corpses, its physical arrival ahead of schedule will lead me to believe otherwise.

Good to see that they have come back into operation, however I certainly hope that there is some form of investigation and sanctions applied to China if it is proven that they lied about the virus, both by numbers and its infectiousness. Also hope there are sanctions imposed on them for their now documented https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8167869/Inside-Australian-factory-packed-coronavirus-supplies-sent-CHINA.html (and as reported by the British government) abhorrence in using Chinese government owned companies they have world wide to purchase medical supplies from other countries and send them back to china during their outbreak leading to a shortage in the western world. Not to mention that the illegally requisitioned British owned factories in China manufacturing PPE for the UK meaning the supply chain to UK was removed.

Quote

My neighbor also put a number to the Chinese deception, claiming that 42 million had died. In light of Drayke's article link, I'm going to chalk this up to the meaningless of decimal position to people who are ignorant of basic facts. There are a lot of us!

I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories either. I certainly wouldn't also agree with your neighbour, unless you submit to conspiracy theories about China's Mobile phone carriers recently loosing 21million subscriptions over the past months and try to attribute that to deaths like some are...

Edited March 31, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[Cindy Evanier]

16 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

I don’t see the spammer, but I noticed a few days ago one disappeared in another thread that I hadn’t bothered to report (because didn’t want to burden mods). So I think the mods are on the ball. 

 

16 hours ago, Cindy Evanier said:

there was one yesterday that took a while to be removed.  There was another one a couple of hours ago that was gone within 10 minutes of us reporting.  

and right now... 1 am slt  we have spammer #3 -  what a joy