In the past six months, a full semester, the United States has suffered more deaths and illnesses from the new coronavirus than any other country in the world. Of the 28 million that showed human COVID-19 cases and 900,000 documented deaths worldwide, more than 20% of them have occurred in the United States. As of September 9, 2020, 6. 5 million Americans have been screened for the disease and 194,000 have died.
The underlying cause is a small virus, SARS-CoV-2, which is a component of the coronavirus family. It is in the air; You can get it simply by breathing in droplets or aerosols. It’s also highly contagious, with a few other people serving as super spreaders – capable of infecting dozens, loads, or even more than 1,000 more people from a single initial case. With 25,000 to 50,000 new cases a day, loads of deaths a day, and the fall (and flu season) looming, the picture is about to get worse.
And yet there is one thing we can do: we can fight COVID-19 as a scientist. Even after 6 months, it’s not too late. Here’s what you want to happen.
Right now, there are a large number of active COVID-19 cases in the United States – estimated to be around 2. 5 million, or only about 1% of the population. We hope that most of those cases have been resolved without long-term damage (it is still too early to tell), but many, a significant percentage, are most likely to revel in long-lasting negative effects. Damage to the patient’s respiratory formula, circulatory formula, and endocrine formula has been reported, with situations ranging from mild (such as myocarditis) to severe (such as organ failure).
While it is true that elderly, immunosuppressed, or other comorbid patients are at higher risk for severe disease than other groups, severe cases have occurred resulting in long-term injury or even death in young adults, adolescents, and even the elderly. healthy children. Jamain Stephens, a 20-year-old school football player, died of headaches from COVID-19. With many schools reopening for in-person training despite a lack of sufficient precautions, others are right to worry that many other academics (and younger), athletes and non-athletes, will suffer unnecessarily.
That’s not the case, of course. From the beginning, science has indicated the most productive way to prevent the spread of this disease. Although we have done a bad job of following these recommendations in the United States, clinical evidence has only increased. Despite concerted attempts to minimize the virus . . . how contagious it is, how harmful and fatal it is, and how smoothly it can be transmitted without proper precautions: infection rates and the number of deaths do not lie.
From a public competence perspective, there are individual steps we can take for ourselves and those with whom we come in contact. Wearing masks, practicing social distancing, not touching the front (or inside) of our mask, and common hand washing / sanitizing are simple enough for most of us, but without the universal enforcement of their effectiveness. It is limited.
Individual interventions will never achieve the same degrees of good fortune as a coordinated set of national efforts – the same efforts that have been good in countries around the world, from New Zealand to Vietnam, Spain to Italy, and more. If we were to give the reins to science, this is how we could beat this existing pandemic in the United States and return to a “new normal” as in the top countries of Europe and Asia, even before a vaccine is available and effective . .
1. ) We want a national order of protection against the mask. Sorry to anyone who has a medical explanation for why you can’t wear a mask; the fact is that the dangers of transmission and acquisition of the new coronavirus skyrocket without a mask. While the N95 and Surgical Mask are (and will be) reserved for hospital settings, the Hybrid Mask and Two-Layer Cotton Mask offer exceptional coverage in 3 essential ways:
While masks, scarves, scarves and leggings vary in quality and effectiveness, any facial coverage is better than no facial coverage.
Face shields, a popular alternative, offer little or no coverage to the wearer compared to masks.
In contrast, the mask with integrated valves or vents protect the user, but do not protect others. As a general rule of thumb, if you cannot blow out a candle while wearing the liner, it will most likely be effective. Not only are they much less likely to infect others, however, their COVID-19 infections are statistically much more likely to be mild, than severe, or worse.
2. ) Stay away socially and enforce it. When you leave your home or come into contact with someone who does not live directly with you in your home, you stay at least 6 feet (~ 2 meters) from all other people. What constitutes 6 feet?
The explanation is simple: the virus is transmitted through airborne debris that is expelled through respiratory activity, this includes breathing, laughing, singing, talking, yelling, playing musical instruments, coughing and sneezing, among others. Charge thrown into the air can be particularly reduced, as can distance driven through droplets and aerosols. Without a mask, they can go up to more than 26 feet. A recent meta-study found that they were not only 6 feet (2 meters) effective. to cut viral transmission, but every additional 3 feet (1 meter) reduces transmission and sensitivity. Speaking deserves to be normalized when someone is too close to their status, and to leave enough distance between other people for the protection explanation why they deserve to be mandatory.
3. ) Do not gather indoors with other people who live outside in your home. The main determinant of whether someone contracts the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is as undeniable as possible: exposure. The higher your exposure, the higher your chances of contracting COVID-19, and the higher your exposure, the greater the chance that you will have a severe, severe, or even fatal case.
When inside, the aerosol remains in the air and, if in that area is inflamed with SARS-CoV-2, it continues to accumulate the viral load in which the user is located. discovered in this area is exposed. Spaces in which to eat or drink (such as bars or restaurants), where singing a song or speaking aloud is not unusual (such as study rooms or churches), or where difficult, heavy breathing occurs (such as gyms) not only aggravates this effect.
If we were looking to take public conditioning precautions seriously and decrease infection rates, there would be a moratorium on face-to-face collection in spaces like this until the virus is under Fix Although the virus is not low lately in the United States, there is a remarkably undeniable way of doing it.
four. ) Have a “stay at home” plan for four to 6 weeks. This is the massive step that can lead us to victory over the virus, yet it requires national coordination and massive degrees of social compliance to be successful. The explanation why the virus has continued to spread through the population for more than six months, and will continue to do so until existing situations are substantially replaced, is that many of us are also engaging in non-essential contacts.
We can combat this if we have a national shelter in place. We can prepare for this through:
The few contacts that cannot be removed (mainly for fitness reasons) will ensure that a certain amount of virus remains in our population, however, shelter-in-place orders (i. e. stay home) are one of the most successful. fitness interventions that a society can adopt to combat a pandemic such as COVID-19.
5. ) Reopen according to clinical guidelines. Although we have been fighting the new coronavirus in the United States for six months, we are not yet following the recommendations of scientists, we do not have a universal search for contacts. We do not have rapid and widespread mass evidence, as we do not know who is positive and who has been exposed, we do not properly ingest or quarantine, which means that asymptomatic carriers, presymptomatic carriers and others with active and symptomatic infections are all in public, with the possibility of infecting us all.
If we were to prevent this pandemic and save it thousands more deaths, we would have interaction in these 3 interventions:
When infections start to rise, a local home maintenance order can simply weigh an epidemic against this data before it spreads to other communities.
These five interventions, taken together, can, in principle, take us from tens of thousands of new instances consistent with the day to only burdens in a matter of weeks. Just as many countries with giant populations and highly variable population densities have already safely reopened by taking precisely those steps, recovering from catastrophic rates of initial infection, the US has already reopened. The U. S. (And the UK, and other countries with circumstances) can simply advance in combat as opposed to COVID-19. It only requires following the most productive clinical recommendation that experts have to offer.
Without it, the disease will continue to devastate individuals, families, communities, and the country as a whole, the economic effects will be severe and prolonged, and our most productive hope of defeating it will come from a vaccine, even then we will have to be scientifically too Culprit on this front: Vaccines will have to show up and be effective, and in reality, no bachelor is yet anywhere near the finish line. – may have unacceptable appearance effects.
The most productive component of this clinical solution is that it is available to us – we can decide to adopt it at any time. The social and economic effects of the pandemic continue to be disastrous, but they can be addressed by making situations safe for everyone – workers, customers, teachers, and students. Enforce mask orders, distancing requirements, moratoriums on dicy activities and businesses, a coordinated shelter-in-place order for 4-6 weeks, and only reopen with science-based rules in place (which come with tracking tactile, widespread testing, and isolation / quarantine for the inflamed and exposed) we can defeat the virus as a society.
Many of us, of course, are more than tired of having an effect on the new coronavirus it has had on our lives. The idea of having to isolate ourselves more is in fact terrifying, however, it is an action that would possibly have a greater effect on the prevention of this virus than anything we have done to date. Until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available, this is the clinical path to a safe reopened America. We can decide at any time. The faster we do this, the more lives we’ll have saved.
I have a PhD in astrophysics, writer and clinical communicator, who teaches physics and astronomy at universities. I’ve won a lot of awards for clinical writing.
I have a PhD in astrophysicist, writer and clinical communicator, who teaches physics and astronomy at various universities. I have won clinical writing awards since 2008 for my blog, Starts With A Bang, adding the award to the most productive clinical blog of My Two Books, Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive, Beyond the Galaxy: How Human Look at Beyond Our Milk and Way and Discovery the Total Universe, can be purchased on Amazon. me on Twitter @startswithabang.