On a serious note, it seems germain to protecing yourself from coronoavirus and respiratory infections in general. UK advice has been there is nothing you can do to save yourself once you get the virus so you should avoid getting infected. For some reason though cases apparently go up in winter. They went up despite a mask order. I find it curious why there is no discussion of this trend in the news media. Shurley the want to save lives more than anthing else. Thats what this lockdown is about after all... not just trashing the economy for the sake of it.... Im asking this because they have said there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from the virus. That was their offical advice. Dont belive advice your hear in the pub they said, (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51735367). Just wait for the vaccine. A form of induced helplessness. They have also been banning people online for spreading misinformation, which they define as disagreeing with anything the WHO says. One mistake i think they have made is telling people to stay at home, as they have linked obesity to suscptibility to the virus and presumeably other infections. Surely they should be telling people to exercise The problem with the recent lockdown is there is no explanantion for why respiratory infections are more common in winter. What is driving it?
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Cases (people who test positive using a totally bogus test) of Covid-1984 /= infections. Almost everyone who tests positive is healthy.
Respiratory infections increase in the winter due to lack of sunshine (Vit D) and exercise. Duh.
Yep, and
A better question:
Why is nobody dying from influenza?
Check the data and you might see the "Vid increasing" is actually people getting influenza, pneumonia or a common cold. The symptoms are similar.
Good question.
Most of the data is an estimate.
The yearly influenza stats are that everyone touts (ie 60,000 in 2017) are estimates based on an algorithm. They are based off reports and estimates. If anything the Covid stats are probably much closer to reality than the flu stats everyone keeps comparing it to.
Flu season. Typically September- October through May- April. SARS-CoV-2 and influenza are both Corona Virus style bodies. Corona viruses (and most viruses, as to my understanding) live better in colder weather. It's just a flu.
It's more of a cold than it is the flu. Plus the molecular structure of this virus makes it a little more robust than either of those.
dear Siteless, that too is my suspicion. Temperature matters in contraction of this virus. I suspect respiratory infections take hold partly because of the cold air flowing through that area adn the body induces a fever because its a protection.
Nonetheless, surely they would tell people that, if it were true. In fact they have said the opposite. They have said there is nothing you can do. In fact they have told people to keep their windows open. So it cant be correct.
which leaves the question. why
Remember a few months back when the mainstream media told us the temperature didn't matter and we needed to stay locked indoors all summer long? They never seem to get tired of being wrong.
Long but excellent paper with plenty of citations https://www.rcreader.com/commentary/masks-dont-work-covid-a-review-of-science-relevant-to-covide-19-social-policy
‘ In a landmark study, Shaman et al. (2010) showed that the seasonal pattern of extra respiratory-disease mortality can be explained quantitatively on the sole basis of absolute humidity, and its direct controlling impact on transmission of airborne pathogens.
Lowen et al. (2007) demonstrated the phenomenon of humidity-dependent airborne-virus virulence in actual disease transmission between guinea pigs, and discussed potential underlying mechanisms for the measured controlling effect of humidity.
The underlying mechanism is that the pathogen-laden aerosol particles or droplets are neutralized within a half-life that monotonically and significantly decreases with increasing ambient humidity. This is based on the seminal work of Harper (1961). Harper experimentally showed that viral-pathogen-carrying droplets were inactivated within shorter and shorter times, as ambient humidity was increased.
Harper argued that the viruses themselves were made inoperative by the humidity (“viable decay”), however, he admitted that the effect could be from humidity-enhanced physical removal or sedimentation of the droplets (“physical loss”): “Aerosol viabilities reported in this paper are based on the ratio of virus titre to radioactive count in suspension and cloud samples, and can be criticized on the ground that test and tracer materials were not physically identical.”
The latter (“physical loss”) seems more plausible to me, since humidity would have a universal physical effect of causing particle/droplet growth and sedimentation, and all tested viral pathogens have essentially the same humidity-driven “decay.” Furthermore, it is difficult to understand how a virion (of all virus types) in a droplet would be molecularly or structurally attacked or damaged by an increase in ambient humidity. A “virion” is the complete, infective form of a virus outside a host cell, with a core of RNA or DNA and a capsid. The actual mechanism of such humidity-driven intra-droplet “viable decay” of a virion has not been explained or studied.
In any case, the explanation and model of Shaman et al. (2010) is not dependent on the particular mechanism of the humidity-driven decay of virions in aerosol/droplets. Shaman’s quantitatively demonstrated model of seasonal regional viral epidemiology is valid for either mechanism (or combination of mechanisms), whether “viable decay” or “physical loss.”
The breakthrough achieved by Shaman et al. is not merely some academic point. Rather, it has profound health-policy implications, which have been entirely ignored or overlooked in the current coronavirus pandemic.
In particular, Shaman’s work necessarily implies that, rather than being a fixed number (dependent solely on the spatial-temporal structure of social interactions in a completely susceptible population, and on the viral strain), the epidemic’s basic reproduction number (R0) is highly or predominantly dependent on ambient absolute humidity.’
It can be mixed with flu.
There's no such thing as Covid bar the Wuhan bio-weapon.