Howdy Folks, it’s your friendly, neighborhood scientist here to talk about Covid19.
I’ve seen quite a few post going around that get an A for effort but a C for content and wanted to post to clear up a few things.
- The disease COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, these are the proper names and should be used exclusively to talk about the disease and its cause.
- Just as reliable sources have been saying since the start of the outbreak, the best way to protect yourself is by maintaining social distance (6 ft) and washing your hands. A possible protocol is to check your temperature every day to monitor for possible fever, wash your hands when leaving the house as well as the first thing to do you when you get home as well as wiping down your phone at these times as well.
Other things such as wiping down bags can help so long as the bags are plastic, but the virus has a limited lifespan (likely a few hours) on fabric so please act accordingly. You don’t need to wipe your pets paws or shed outer layers of clothing unless you are going into direct contact with known cases. While there’s always a chance of exposure, it’s still a low one just going out in public.
- There’s a big, long, detailed post talking about the virus being an RNA virus and goes into details about immunology. Well, like most things in biology it’s not simple but I at least want people to know the truth.
There’s no such thing as a “human virus” it’s more about what your body has been trained to recognize. Everyone has two types of immune response, the innate, which does not have to be trained, and the adaptive, which does have to be trained. Every time you get sick or get a vaccine your body is training your adaptive immune response, which is why lymph nodes may swell and you may feel more tired or sore. Your body builds up a profile of things that are “self” and things that are “other”. The thing is, the immune system has to see something before it can categorize it. Think of your immune response as a police officer in a mall. If the officer has been told that someone in the mall is planning to attack, it’s not useful information. If the officer has been told that people with pink hats are planning an attack, it gives the officer something to work from to identify possible attackers.
So for disease you have experienced before, your body stores information on how to identify that past attacker which lets you have a better chance of not getting sick or fighting the disease faster. Diseases will mutate year after year, causing you to need a flu shot every year, but your body can learn that pink hats are pretty close to magenta hats so it has a faster response to magenta than to a green hatted attacker.
COVID-19 is different because it doesn’t look like anything your body has seen before. No one has a trained immune response to this particular disease before exposure. This is part of why everyone is getting sick. We’re all relying on the innate immune response which is neither as specific nor as systemic as the adaptive immune response.
For now, while people are working on vaccines, our best bet is to roll out as widespread testing as we can. This will let us properly identify all cases, rather than just the extreme ones. Once we start knowing the true case load in the country, we can isolate just the affected individuals rather than shutting down whole swaths. Actions like this are allowing other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, to mitigate the lock downs. As we identify we can isolate, as we isolate we can release everyone else to go closer back to normal.
We’re in this for the long run. Expect cases to increase in the US for the next 10-14 days, after that time we’ll see what effect the social distancing is having.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel, we just don’t know when we’ll get there.
Stay safe, and stay healthy everyone!
-Colleen Out
PMP in the Lab 