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Coronavirus transmission prevention device.

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Here in the United Kingdom,
84,279 cases
10,612 deaths as of the 12th April 2020
highest daily death toll a couple of days ago was 980, 10th April
917 11th April
737 0n the 12th April so far.
Bloody difficult to cope with. Classed as extremely vulnerable but no real assistance as yet.
:(
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
Was thinking some form of UV device for disinfecting surfaces
Short wave-length ultra-violet has been used since about the early 20th century as a disinfectant, with side benefits of ozone generation which some people believe is healthful in small doses. Ozone is what you smell after a heavy thunderstorm goes by overhead. It is caused by cloud-to-cloud lightning discharges. Ozone created by an ultra-violet lamp is a direct result of O2 ionization (and disassociation) followed by O3 (ozone) production when the ions re-combine. "Back in the day" UV germicidal lamps were popular in motel bathrooms as hedges against disease... used much like condoms were used against the "disease" of pregnancy. Nobody who rented a motel room really knew if either one worked as advertised (Warning! This product is sold only for the prevention of disease!), but worth a try.

UV germicidal lamps disappeared from motel rooms quite some time ago, probably because of fear of lawsuits from people whose vision was damaged from staring directly into the lamp for hours on end. In the 1980s I was using a small UV lamp to erase EPROMs. The EPROMs were placed on a conductive foam mat located on the bottom of the inside an open plastic case. The UV lamp was then placed on top of the case, lamp pointed downward toward the EPROMs. There was room inside the case for about six EPROMs, so I always had a blank (erased) EPROM available during Intel 8085 microprocessor program development. I had an Intel Microprocessor Development System (MDS) with In-Circuit Emulator (ICE) available for program development, but it was easier to just make program changes and then "burn" the new program into an erased EPROM. I never trusted the ICE because my embedded microprocessor application programs were all hardware interrupt-driven and timing was critical. Better to try out different software (or firmware) iterations on the final hardware with nothing between the CPU and memory except the data and address buses.

So, anyhoo... I still have the lamp and may try it out to see how well it sterilizes. Of course, before I do that I will need to brush up on my microscopy techniques, recall how to stain cells, try to remember what Gram Negative and Gram Positive means, and... oh, yeah... purchase a microscope, some Petri dishes, some agar-agar growth media...

Oh, wait! All that stuff is what I would use to examine cells, not viruses! Actually, I need to purchase a transmission electron microscope to "see" the sub-micron sized corona virus, plus a supply of those nifty sealed containers made in Isreal for electron microscope examination of biological samples in a vacuum environment, which said viruses I don't want to actually encounter in my environment. And since it is a virus, there is probably no way to "see" if UV radiation will "kill" or deactivate it, even with an electron microscope. <sigh> Are viruses even "alive" since they propagate only within real living cells, never all by themselves?

Back to continued hand washing and social distancing, staying relatively safe inside my cave, at least for now...
 
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Hmm good post Hevans, didn't really consider are the viruses alive aspect. Would be interesting to know if UV actually does kill them tho.
 
The church pastor who kept his church open because "god will save us" has died of the Covid-19 virus. Now most of his church-goers have the virus. Trump has a golf course and hotels that are closed. He want to ...., never mind.
 
The church pastor who kept his church open because "god will save us" has died of the Covid-19 virus. Now most of his church-goers have the virus. Trump has a golf course and hotels that are closed. He want to ...., never mind.
I don't think God ever told people to act like idiots.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
... Would be interesting to know if UV actually does kill them...
Short-wave UV is ionizing radiation, like x-rays and gamma rays, but less energy per photon. When a molecule is ionized by radiation it absorbs a photon and loses one or more electrons. This makes it really difficult to put the molecule back together again, especially protein molecules which have complex three-dimensional "folding rules." If that particular molecule was important to the life-cycle of an organism, and it is effectively destroyed, then the cell that needed that molecule will die. I suspect the same is true of viruses, which are made of complex proteins. Screw up their bio-chemistry and they don't work so good anymore. Or maybe they "adapt" and become resistant to radiation, in which case we are screwed.

About that church pastor who died after a COVID19 infection from the novel coronavirus... he should surely have realized that only Jesus promised to save anyone, and then only after your death and resurrection and JC's vetting of you before God.

I doubt any real religious leader would ask their followers to go forth and get sick to "prove" God will take care of them, if only they believe and have enough faith. But then, "true believers" are never known to be the sharpest sticks in the pile, the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree... whatever... witness the November 1978 Jonestown massacre, for example, where some 900 people voluntarily "drank the Kool-Aid" laced with cyanide poison and died. Okay, so it wasn't real Kool-Aid being instead a competitor's grape-flavored Flavor Aid... but they still died.

The novel coronavirus may just be a prelude, sort of a field trial, for the "real deal" that will have a 99 44/100% fatality rate (pure as Ivory soap!) and will be extremely successful in "thinning the herd" so the survivors, meek or weak as they may be, will inherit the Earth. If the "real deal" is man-made, it makes sense to get some data on how fast, and to where, it is likely to spread.

Isaac Asimov wrote a novel, "The Caves of Steel," that featured a superior branch of the human tree (they were colonizers of other planets) who were so afraid of disease that they seldom (if ever) had any direct physical contact with their fellow citizens. They used highly advanced robots for everything. Naturally they despised original Earth-men, who rejected robotic labor. This was the first book in the Good Doctor's series of robotic novels, and where the Three Laws of Robotics were first set in print. Dr. Asimov really took "social distancing" to absurd limits, pairing up an Earth detective with a robot indistinguishable from a human being to solve a murder that occurred on the "spacers" originally colonized, Eutopian, planet where crime was unheard of. That was the ostensible reason why they needed help from an Earth detective, but insisted on pairing him with one of their more advanced robots. I enjoyed it immensely and I don't think it is too dated for modern readers.
 
Many Super-Spreader occurrences happened all over the world when people crowded around at religious gatherings.
Aren't the crowded beaches in Florida religious gatherings?

Yesterday I drove past a "Halal" food store that had hundreds of "different" looking people outside in a lineup passing the virus around because they were crowded together. The emergency law here says "no more than 5 people in a group and they must be spread 2 meters apart". If the law enforcement people were called and handed out hundreds of $800 tickets then the city would have its deficit reduced (nobody rides the busses anymore).
One guy in a nearby town had a big outdoors party and his crowded friends passed the virus around. He was fined $100,000.

All the people above will pass the virus to everybody who goes near them for at least 2 weeks. Then those people will also spread the virus so the gatherings are called Super-Spreaders. Lock-downs work, people should obey them.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
@Audioguru: It really is too bad that schools (apparently) do not teach children, who then grow up to be stupid adults, the importance and practicality of situations that generate exponential growth. Compound interest was the stellar example that I learned when I knew enough math to appreciate it. Now we have another real-world example in the novel coronavirus that doesn't require a Swiss banker to understand.

Oh, yeah, some folks here in Florida think it is their "right" to visit crowded beaches. AFAIK fines are minimal, or nonexistent, or simply not enforced... the only thing that cleared out the beaches here was Red Tide.
 
The USA will lead the way and the rest of the world will be watching.
There are already mass gatherings demanding lifting of the lock downs.
I say let them have their way. If there is a rampant upswing of new infections
and thousands die it will be a good lesson for the rest of the world.
We have to be very thankful that it's not an aerosol transmission.
I hope it doesn't go on much longer.
Another few months and the global economy will simply crash.
What happens if all countries go bankrupt ?
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
What happens if all countries go bankrupt ?
That would be hard to predict, but here in the USA our country has been bankrupt for a long time, depending on investors both here and abroad pouring in cash to finance the interest on our national debt, with no signs that any effort to reduce the principle is in sight. It's a Ponzi scheme that depends on exponential economic growth. The world economy exists for the same reason: unlimited and increasing growth in goods and services to finance the trade among nations.

Maybe the next wave of viruses will thin the herd, perhaps to extinction. That worked for Carrier Pigeons and almost worked for American Buffalo, with unconstrained hunting being the "virus" that did them in. There is no guarantee the human race will continue to populate and pollute planet Earth. And right now we have no other planets for the masses to escape to, much less the means to do so.

Oh, it is possible some conspiracy theorists will claim there are secret bases on the far side of the moon that the elite will escape to, using the Area 51 technology we stole from aliens and then developed. That is about as likely as the super rich building Doomsday underground shelters in New Zealand and moving in before the government closed the island to further entry... oh, wait, that did happen.

Right now the future looks kinda bleak...
 
The lockdown has caused air pollution to be much less than before.
Yeah, the virus is thinning the herd, only the strong (and smart) humans will survive.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
Last night i looked but I did not see the meteor shower.
The rate of occurrence for the Lyrid meteor shower is only 10 to 20 per hour, and this only during the peak that occurred the night of April 21 through the early morning of April 22. The shower continues through the end of the month but with decreasing rate of occurrence. Maybe you should get a lawn chair, bundle up warmly, and wait outside overnight to see the meteor shower. Lots more opportunity next year because this particular shower has observations going back to 687 BC. Visit this link for more information.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
That, plus eventually they will run out of supplies if there is no one outside to deliver any, at any cost. Thus the uber rich only prolong the inevitable. Not willing to believe they would actually get dirt under their fingernails trying to grow food underground in a bunker.
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
Just visited this link (again) to see how many people have died while infected with the novel corona virus or COVID19. There have been several virus mutations since the COVID pandemic started and two types of "vaccines" were developed. One, based on messenger RNA (mRNA), and another based on a weakened form of the virus. AFAIK, no-one knows how effective getting "jabs" from either version really is. It was said that there simply was not enough time to select a cohort and to do a double-blind field test, where half the cohort would get a "jab" containing the prospective vaccine; the other half of the cohort would also get a "jab" but it would contain only a sterile saline solution placebo. The people getting the "jab" don't know which group they are in, and the people administering the "jab" don't know which syringes contain the trial and which ones contain the placebo. Thus the "double-blind" name of the study.

The USA Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) has certain criteria for certifying a new drug or medical procedure. Among those criteria are it must be both safe and effective. It takes a long time to demonstrate safety and "safety" can NEVER be proven or guaranteed. It only takes ONE counter-example of non-safe use to demonstrate that a new drug or procedure in NOT safe under the circumstances for which it is taken. Look at what happened with thalidomide, and look here for a deep dive into why thalidomide made a big come-back a few years ago.

Within a large cohort, some will become sick after receiving their "jab" and after exposure to the virus. We would expect the sick people in the group getting the placebo to be statistically larger than the sick people getting the prospective vaccine. If a larger, or equal, number of sick people occurs in the placebo group, compared to the number of sick people in the group getting the prospective vaccine, we can be pretty confident that whatever the prospective vaccine is, it is NOT effective against the virus. On the other hand, if a significant number receiving the prospective vaccine DO NOT get sick, then the prospective vaccine MAY be responsible for that.

There are problems administering a double-blind medical trial. If infection by the virus is highly fatal, is it even moral to have a "control group" that receives only the placebo? If it is morally acceptable, how large must the "control group" be to obtain statistical confidence in the data? Is it morally ethical to deliberately expose anyone, the whole cohort, to the virus "for the greater good" or whatever rationale you can think of, knowing that some will get sick and die? These are tough decisions to make, and because it was a "crisis" the Government decided that citizens would have no right to sue Big Pharma if something went wrong, such as an allergic reaction, or if the virus nevertheless infected those who received the "jab" with the prospective vaccine. So Big Pharma was protected, whether anyone receiving the vaccine benefited or not.

The question I have is: Was it worth it? I looking at the COVID death rates, it does appear that both types of vaccine have slowed down or reduced the rate of COVID deaths. But at what cost? How many people die every year from ordinary yearly flu infections? How about other causes of death? Did Big Pharma do us any favors by picking the "low-hanging fruit" and rushing it to the public? Medical research and drug development are expensive, so it may have made sense to proceed "full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes" to get something... anything, really... to a government-subsidized market. That is what Big Government is usually good at: spending money to get things done quickly.

Has it been worth it? I got my two "jabs" this year and AFAIK have avoid getting COVID. But now I have an itchy rash on both arms and will go on a high vitamin C, no-sugar, diet for a few weeks to see if that will clear it up. Wife says for me to delay getting the third "booster jab" or whatever THAT is. Will it be effective against the latest mutation? Are people at work in secret laboratories trying to figure out how to make COVID more fatal, more, contagious, and targeted to specific genomes? Do I have too much (or too little) melanin under my skin and would melanin be an effective genetic discriminant? Hows about blue eyes (mine are brown) and blonde hair (my hair is also brown, tending toward gray now)? We are already using viruses to deliver drugs to targeted human cells because the virus has the biological "key" to slip into the cell. Looking ahead to what may be possible, it scares the bejesus out of me.

Since we mapped out the human genome in the previous century, there is tremendous opportunity to do both a lot of good as well as a lot of evil. Well, maybe it's a moot point now if we melt all the ice on the planet with global climate change. There might not be any of "us" left to populate the next century. Oh, well. It has been an interesting time so far... that's an old Chinese curse, by the way.:eek:

Hop
 
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