Hello everyone, this is your friendly neighborhood scientist with what I am now calling a Collateral Science post about COVID19.
COVID19 and 5G – This comes to us from the depths of paranoid internet dwellers and fans of tin foil. The theory goes that COVID19 has nothing to do with a virus and everything to do with 5G being established. Well, I want to state up front that COVID19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that can be isolated from affected individuals. We know that this is caused by a virus because of if we purposely infect monkeys they can develop the same symptoms as humans do, such as fever, coughing, and pneumonia.
COVID19 and Blood Type – A study is in pre-print (meaning that it has been written but not published in a peer reviewed journal) that states people with blood type A are more likely to be hospitalized with the disease than blood type O based on sampling of hospital patients vs non-COVID19 patients. This is a prime example of correlation without causation, and that becomes really clear given a little more information on blood types.
Blood types are detected in four varieties, A, B, O, and AB. Everyone can have up to two type markers on their red blood cells, imagine them as empty spaces __ & __. When someone has an AB blood type their spaces are filled with A & B. But here’s the thing, O type? It’s actually type zero, as in they don’t have markers, meaning their cells present as __ & __. So when someone has a blood type A they could be A & __ or they could be A & A, same thing with B type.
Getting back to SARS-CoV-2, this means that if the virus interacted with blood types in any way then distribution patterns would be thrown off by people who have an AO or BO blood type. Since there’s no current evidence about SARS-CoV-2 interacting with blood cells, there’s no need to be concerned based on your blood type.
Drinking liquids and disease prevention – I want to say first that drinking frequency or temperature will not prevent infection. There are a couple of different forms of this particular misunderstanding going around, and I think part of the reason is that it just sounds good and we’re desperate for something that makes sense in all of this. Viruses, SARS-CoV-2 and others, all have things that help them get into cells and ways to attach to cells to work their way inside. While older drawings of viruses styled them a lot like lunar landers, many viruses are actually more like buckyballs, an array of points and spikes. When a virus comes into contact with a cell, the spikes that cover it are capable of fitting into proteins on your cells that allows them to start infiltrating the cell. This works kind of like velcro where a virus is able to hook onto a cell and not let go. This means that you can’t just wash away the virus by drinking water, or prevent it by drinking hot tea. Liquids don’t change the structure of your cells or the virus, and once the virus is hooked, water can’t just wash it away.
I’m going to start more frequent posts to break down a few rumors a day. Let me know if you like the format and please suggest more topics to tackle, I’ll do what I can to get to them all.
PMP in the Lab 