Discerning Truth: COVID-19 Part 1

Hi folks, welcome to Discerning Truth, the webcast of the

Biblical Science Institute. And we call this Discerning Truth because that's really what the Biblical Science Institute is all about, discerning truth from error, helping people to understand science properly, to spot errors in reasoning, and of course to distinguish truthful claims from fiction.

Now our society has never been in greater need of the ability to discern truth from error because things like the internet and media make it so easy to propagate truth and to propagate error.

And so we need to be able to distinguish between those. I thought in this particular webcast we could address COVID -19 and the coronavirus because there's a lot of misinformation on that issue.

A lot of people are panicking needlessly I think, I mean there should be some concern. Some of the information that has been presented is true, but it's stated in a way that is a little bit misleading.

There are these statistics, and a lot of people don't always know what to make of statistics, so I thought perhaps some of my training as a scientist can lend some insight into these issues.

So it's important to understand this issue because lives are being destroyed, not just by the virus, but by the way society has reacted to the virus.

And so that's important as well. COVID -19, that refers to the disease that the virus causes, not the virus itself.

The full name is coronavirus disease of 2019, because that's the year it was discovered.

The disease is caused by a virus. Viruses are molecular biological machines that cannot replicate on their own, but instead infect a living cell and use its machinery to produce more copies of the virus.

It's ingenious and rather insidious. And there are several different ways that viruses can infect cells, but we're going to focus in on the coronavirus, which is actually a family of viruses.

Now corona means crown, and viruses in this family are so named because of the characteristic appearance of the virus, which has these surface projections.

You've probably seen images of it, and when you view them under a powerful microscope, especially in two dimensions, it looks like a crown surrounding the surface of the virus there.

There are many different varieties of coronavirus. There are six known species of coronavirus that can infect humans.

Three are very mild. Two are potentially more severe. And then we have this new coronavirus that was discovered in 2019.

Now chances are at some point in your life, you have had one of the three mild coronavirus infections.

If you've ever had a head cold, 40 to 50 % of head colds are caused by rhinovirus, but about 15 % are caused by a coronavirus.

So if you've had at least seven colds in your life, statistically at least one of them was caused by a coronavirus. Now the particular coronavirus that everyone's worried about is

SARS -CoV -2. That's the one that's responsible for COVID -19. And SARS -CoV -2, that stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2.

When it was first discovered, it was called a novel coronavirus because it was new to human beings anyway. We've not been infected with this particular variety before, and that's kind of what makes it a little bit scary because it's unknown.

It is genetically very, very similar to a coronavirus that is found in bats. And so the hypothesis is that the first humans to contract this virus did so by eating bats.

Folks, don't eat bats. Just don't. Coronaviruses are

RNA -based. Now just a little background there. All living organisms have instructions in DNA.

DNA is that long molecule that looks like a twisted ladder, the double helix, which is in the nucleus of your cells.

And DNA is more stable than RNA. All the instructions to make you are encoded in your

DNA, stored in the nucleus of your cell. That's kind of the vault that protects that information because it's so important.

And then there are enzymes in your cells, little biological machines, that can read the DNA and make an

RNA copy of one of the strands of the DNA. And then the RNA can go outside the nucleus, and it's read by ribosomes.

Ribosomes are able to read the nucleotide sequence in the RNA, and they're able to produce proteins, including the proteins that make ribosomes and the proteins that make these enzymes that read the

DNA and so on. So each part depends on all the others, which is why it couldn't have evolved.

It has to have been created pretty similar to the way it is today. You can have small changes, but none of the essential parts can change or the cell would die.

Coronavirus is a positive -sense, single -stranded RNA virus. Now remember,

DNA is double -stranded, and the second strand contains the opposite nucleotides of the first strand.

You might call that the secondary strand. So positive -sense means that the RNA in the virus can be directly translated by the ribosomes into proteins, the proteins that the virus needs to replicate.

So the virus infects your cell, injects its RNA in, the RNA is read by the ribosomes, and that produces more copies of the virus.

Now this is unlike influenza, for example. The virus responsible for influenza is a negative -sense

RNA -based virus, and so it has the opposite instructions, and so they can't be read directly by the ribosomes.

And so influenza, therefore, must contain RNA polymerase to transcribe that RNA into a positive -sense in order to be read by the ribosomes, but the coronavirus can skip that step because its

RNA is already to be read by the ribosomes. Now RNA viruses have a much higher mutation rate compared to DNA viruses, and that's because they lack the proofreading ability of enzymes that are associated with DNA.

But this allows them to diversify quickly, which makes vaccine production a bit more difficult because they're changing a little bit, not in any fundamental way, but they're small changes in the protein structure.

But the good news is it means that the virus loses strength much faster, because mutations are not good for you.

They don't give you superpowers. They cause problems, and I mean there's some that are neutral, but these viruses are constantly losing, unraveling some of their instructions, and they lose potency then.

And there seems to be some evidence already that this is happening with SARS -CoV -2. It's less deadly now than it was at the start, and that's good.

Okay, what are the symptoms of COVID -19? The vast majority of people who contract

COVID -19 will have mild symptoms. The two most common symptoms are fever, which occurs in 88 % of the cases, and a dry cough, which occurs in 68 % of cases.

So 9 out of 10 people, you're going to get chills, you're going to get a fever. Two out of three, you're going to get a dry cough.

Not so bad. Interestingly, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, estimates that as many as 40 % of people who contract

COVID -19 will show no symptoms at all. So it's so mild, you don't even know you have it.

Now that number may change. Again, there's still a lot we don't know about this virus, but it could be that some of the tests are actually false positives, so it says you're infected and you really aren't.

That's a possibility. We need to watch out for that. But in any case, it could also be the case that some people just don't have any symptoms.

Of those who do develop symptoms, again, you're going to probably get a fever, maybe a cough. One in five will develop shortness of breath.

There are other symptoms that can accompany it, but they're less common. A temporary loss of smell and taste, that can happen.

Of course, that often happens with a cold as well. Headaches, fatigue, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea, diarrhea, those are less common, but they can happen.

People I know who have contracted COVID -19 and recovered have said, I'd rather have this than the flu. So just keep that in mind.

I know there's a lot of panic surrounding this, but for the vast majority of people, it's going to be like a bad cold or something like the flu.

For most people, it's not as severe as the flu. However, it is more contagious than the flu.

This is indicated by what's called the reproduction number. The R0 value for influenza is about 1 .3.

That's how many people you're statistically likely to infect, if you get infected, 1 .3

on average. So you're going to infect one other person and occasionally two. Now, I've seen different numbers for the

R0 of COVID -19, but they're generally higher than the flu. I've seen anywhere between two and one that was up to 5 .7.

So it's much more contagious than the flu. But again, some of the people that I've seen who have got it have said it's not as bad as the flu, actually.

People get concerned because they hear about all these people dying from COVID -19. Now I want you to understand, that can happen.

But keep in mind, you can also die from the flu. Every year people die from the flu, but we don't close down businesses and crash our economy.

So how does the flu compare to COVID -19 in terms of mortality rates? According to the

CDC, and I'm using their numbers, they may not be right, but I'm using their numbers. For people who are under 70, 70 years of age, who contract

COVID -19, they have a chance of dying that is 0 .05%.

Okay. So it can happen, but it's not real common. It's 1 in 2 ,000. And again, that's according to the

CDC. And by their numbers as well, people who contract the flu have a 0 .1

% chance of dying. That's twice as high as the COVID -19 mortality rate.

So by those numbers, it's less deadly than the flu. Now more people will die from it than the flu because it's more contagious than the flu.

More people will get it. But the point is, according to the CDC's numbers, if you're under 70 and person

A gets COVID -19, person B gets the flu, person B is twice as likely to die as person

A. And so this panic that we're seeing, I think is unjustified.

Now the way that the statistics are often reported can be very misleading, making it look like the virus is super deadly.

Again, it can be deadly, but it's not super deadly. Most people are not going to die from this.

For example, the CDC reports that COVID -19 deaths this year in the United States from February 1st through November 28th, and those are the dates

I'll use for all these numbers, February 1st through November 28th, so I can compare apples with apples.

Okay. The number of COVID deaths, 249 ,570.

Wow, that sounds like a lot. Keep in mind, in that same time period, 11 million people contracted

COVID -19 and did not die. 249 ,000 died, 11 million didn't.

You don't hear that number as much. Something to think about. But the other important thing to understand is that this number, the 249 ,570, includes deaths by other causes where the person happened to test

COVID -positive. We've all heard the stories. Somebody dies in a motorcycle accident, and then the medical examiner posthumously tests his blood, and it turns out he's

COVID -positive. That would be included in that list, even though COVID -19 wasn't the cause of death at all.

He was killed in a motorcycle accident. But he's COVID -positive, so it goes in the list. Now, they're not really supposed to do that.

The medical examiner is supposed to include in that number any death for which

COVID -19 was a contributor. But one wonders how objective that is.

How do you decide that? Is there a financial gain? Do hospitals get more money from the government if they have more

COVID patients? And so is there a motivation to up that number? Perhaps. I'm not sure.

And so you'll see these headlines. COVID -19 is now the third leading cause of death in the U .S.

That's a bit misleading. Why? Well, because it ignores comorbidity.

The vast majority of deaths that are labeled as COVID deaths were people who had, in addition to COVID -19, two or three other deadly diseases.

According to the CDC, the average comorbidity factor of a death, of a COVID death, is 2 .6.

That means, on average, the person who dies and happens to be COVID -positive also had 2 .6 other diseases.

So some two, some three other severe diseases. Okay? So most of the people on that list of 249 ,000 who died had two or three other diseases like heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia that also contributed to their death.

It wasn't just COVID -19. It was a combination. Most common are influenza and pneumonia, respiratory failure, hypertension, diabetes, and cardiac arrest.

If you have lung problems or heart problems or blood sugar problems, diabetes, that can contribute to your death.

Those things are deadly, potentially. And so now did COVID play a role?

Possibly, but it's hard to say because you have all these other diseases that are competing. You know, which one actually killed the patient?

Well, it's multifaceted, isn't it? It was a group effort. And, you know, you can think of your health like this guy who's trying to defend you and then high blood pressure comes along and just smacks on the guy and then pneumonia comes along and punches your health right in the stomach and then diabetes comes along and smacks him in the face a couple times and the guy's just, you can hardly, you know, stand up and then

COVID -19 comes over and just gives him a little push and down he goes. So it kind of increases the lethality of these other diseases.

Is COVID -19 by itself very deadly? You can die just from COVID -19, but according to the

CDC, only 6 % of patients who died COVID -positive had no other reported comorbidities.

Okay, so the number of people that actually died of just COVID -19 with no other deadly diseases that were reported is 6 % of that number which works out to 15 ,000 people.

15 ,000 people. Now, that number, that doesn't even make the top 10 list of the most common causes of death in the

United States of America. That's not even in the top 10. To put that in perspective, that number, 15 ,000, is less than half the number of automobile accident deaths reported in 2018 which was 36 ,560.

Now, we could have prevented those deaths, you know, the 36 ,560 automobile deaths in 2018, we could have prevented those.

All we'd have to do is shut down all the roads, outlaw motor vehicles. Of course, that would be stupid.

It would shut down almost all commerce, and millions would die of starvation.

You don't sacrifice millions to save 36 ,000. It just doesn't make sense. But the leaders of many governments, in their wisdom, have insisted on closing down businesses, ruining people's ability to provide for themselves and their families, all to protect the citizens, allegedly, from a virus that by itself is less likely to kill you than your car.

And so my point is, if it's irrational to shut down all roads to protect 36 ,000 lives, how much more illogical is it to shut down everything, destroy small businesses to protect 15 ,000 lives, assuming that would actually protect them?

Now, don't get me wrong. I do think that we should take some precautions to protect those people, especially those people who have preexisting conditions, but not by destroying the livelihood of 300 million

Americans. And, of course, other nations depend on our economy as well. By the way, the number of suicides in 2018 in the

United States was 48 ,344. Compare that to the 15 ,000

COVID deaths that had no reported preexisting conditions. Have you ever thought about how the way society has responded to this virus is going to affect the suicide rate this year?

I couldn't find numbers on that. Maybe they only report it at the end of the year, I don't know. But in any case, a lot of people are going to die by suicide because their life has been destroyed, not by a virus, but by the reaction to it because they can't earn a living.

I saw an article a while back that said the number of suicides in Japan in one month was higher than the reported COVID deaths for that year.

That's interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be correct. Now, some people have the impression that the

CDC reporting COVID deaths as 249 ,000 is dishonest or misleading.

I don't think there's any intentional deception there because COVID -19 probably did contribute to many of those deaths, right?

I mean, most of those 249 ,000 deaths were multifaceted. They had multiple causes, things like heart disease and pneumonia.

And since those things can kill by themselves, it's unquestionable that a significant number of those 249 ,000 people would have died anyway.

There's no doubt about that. How many? There's no way to know because COVID probably did make things a bit worse.

When multiple diseases contribute to a person's death, what do you list as the cause of death? There's not just one.

For example, according to the CDC's numbers, the deaths involving pneumonia from that same time period, excluding influenza, so pneumonia but not influenza, 249 ,148.

And if that number, 249 ,000, sounds familiar, that's the same as the number of COVID -19 deaths, about the same, within 1 % for that time period,

February 1st through November 28th. You don't hear about that, all these people dying from pneumonia.

People die of pneumonia every year. You don't hear about it. Everything's COVID these days. Now, keep in mind, that number includes comorbidities.

It probably overlaps. Some of those people that died of pneumonia also died of COVID -19, so there's some overlap there, and it's hard to know how much that is.

But my point is, people die from pneumonia every year. This year, as many have died from pneumonia as COVID -19, roughly, same order of magnitude.

Why didn't we shut down businesses last year when people had pneumonia and influenza? Because that would be stupid.

It would cause far more hardship than it would alleviate. There was a study in Italy of 355 deaths that happened to test positive for COVID -19, and in that study, only three patients, which is 0 .8%,

had no preexisting conditions. That's interesting. Ninety -nine percent had at least one other preexisting health condition.

If you want the breakdown, 25 % of these deaths had exactly one other serious health condition.

Twenty -six had two. Forty -nine percent had at least three other preexisting conditions.

So think about that. In that study, of those 355 deaths, half of those people that died of COVID -19 actually had three other diseases that were contributing to their death.

Only 0 .8 % had no comorbidity factors. That's way less than the

CDC's number of 6%. Now, if you use the Italy study, and you use its number of 0 .8%,

and you multiply that by the 249 ,000, you get the number of deaths in the

United States that are pure COVID deaths. It would be less than 2 ,000. And so it really gives you a feel for what we're dealing with here.

We're not dealing with a virus that by itself is all that deadly. Yes, it can kill by itself, but it's very rare.

Usually, it helps other diseases. So regardless of which numbers we use, COVID -19 is very survivable.

Even if you include all these comorbidities, a lot more people did not die of COVID -19 than did.

A lot more, 11 million to 249 ,000. So it's not the plague. If you have no preexisting conditions, the probability of dying from this disease is pretty close to zero.

I'll admit it's not exactly zero, but it's pretty close. Chances are you'll get a fever and a cough, maybe a headache for a week or two.

A small percentage continue to have some symptoms that linger for several weeks. They still feel a little tired afterward, but sometimes a bad cold will do that.

And there are ways to minimize those symptoms, and I'll come back to that a little bit later.

Other interesting information from this Italian study was that the average age of a deceased and COVID -19 positive patient was 79 .5

years. The median was 80 .5. So think about that. The vast majority of those people who have died and were

COVID positive were elderly. By the way, the vast majority of people who died that are not

COVID positive are elderly. That's something to think about. If you're elderly, you're just more likely to die of anything.

I don't mean to make light of that. Any death is tragic because human beings are made in God's image. But we need to understand that those who are advanced in years, diseases are going to hit you harder.

COVID is no exception. And by the way, that 79 .5 years average, that is consistent with the

CDC's results as well. If you take a look at their numbers, they've organized it differently, so you can't quite pin down the value.

But it's very clear that elderly are far more susceptible to death by COVID -19 than those who are young.

Now, one way you could interpret that statistic is that COVID -19 just hits the elderly much harder.

They're much more susceptible, at least to its symptoms. Maybe not to getting it, but to its effects once it hits them.

And that might be right. But there's another possibility. I mean, think about it.

How long do most people live? Well, about 80 years, right? In 2018, the life expectancy of the average person in the

United States was 78 .7 years. It's rounded up to 79 years, okay? So of all the people who died in 2018, the average age was 79 years.

Now, none of those people died of COVID -19 because it wasn't in humans yet. They hadn't been exposed to it. The average age of a person who dies

COVID -positive, 79 years. But the average age of a person who dies

COVID -negative is 79 years. So you see, that's the number you would expect to get if COVID -19 was actually doing nothing at all.

If it did not contribute in any way to a person's death, then the average age of death would be unaffected, wouldn't it?

Now, I'm not saying that COVID -19 is doing nothing. I'm just pointing out that if it was a major deadly disease, it would reduce your life expectancy.

But it hasn't. And so that tells us that it's not as deadly as people seem to think it is.

Just as a way to illustrate this, the average age of someone who dies with blue eyes would be about 79 years.

So you say, well, obviously, having blue eyes is far more likely to kill you if you're elderly. No, you're more likely to die if you're elderly.

Eye color is totally irrelevant. So of those 249 ,000 COVID -19 deaths, the average age was 79 years.

The fact that they were COVID -positive might not be all that relevant. It might be that they just had a bad case of natural causes.

Or given the comorbidities, they had these other things that were going to kill them anyway. And so my point is a substantial fraction of that list, of that 249 ,000, would have died anyway of either natural causes or these other factors.

Pneumonia and other things that are trying to kill them. Now, what percentage of that? There's no way to know. There's no way to know.

Putting all this information together, we have 249 ,000 deaths that were COVID -positive.

But the vast majority of those were elderly people, average age of 79, who had at least two to three other deadly diseases.

And so many of them would likely have died even if they hadn't contracted COVID -19. Could COVID -19 have contributed?

Sure, in some cases. There's no way to know how many. We don't know. But the fact that COVID -positive deaths had the same average age as COVID -negative deaths demonstrates that COVID is not the plague.

It's not the plague. If you're under 70 years of age and are in good health, you really have nothing to worry about in terms of death.

You might get sick for a couple weeks, and that's not fun, I know. Now, that's not to say that the risk of death is mathematically zero, because it's not.

But it's on par with being struck by lightning or eaten by a shark. You see my point. There's no basis for fear.

I guess that's the thing I'm trying to get across. Especially if you're under 70 and healthy, there's no basis for fear. Now, if you're over 70 and also have some preexisting conditions, you might want to take some precautions.

I would recommend that. But keep in mind, even in those cases, the probability of death is still very low.

It's just higher than .05%. It's still low. And so there's no reason to panic. Tom Hanks, he was 63 years old when he contracted

COVID -19. He has two preexisting conditions. He has type 2 diabetes, and he has a heart condition.

He has a stent in his heart. And he pulled through fine. He contracted COVID -19.

Now he's fine. So I see people living in fear. They're just panicking.

They're not doing anything but hunkering down. And there's no rational basis for that.

Yes, you should take precautions, but don't live in fear. That's what I'm trying to say.

So all these government mandates requiring you to social distance and closing down businesses, not allowing people to attend church for a disease that, for folks under 70, has a 99 .95

% survival rate, less lethal than the flu, that's absurd. It really is.

Now, I'll grant that back in March when we didn't know much about this and there was some concern that hospitals might be overrun and not have enough respirators to treat all the infections,

I can see the logic in asking people to quarantine for two weeks to flatten the curve. But, folks, that crisis didn't happen.

Most hospitals were not even remotely affected by that. And now that we know how benign

COVID -19 is for the vast majority of healthy people, folks, everything should be open.

Yes, there should be options for those who are at risk. There's touchless delivery. That's a great idea.

Some stores sanitize at night and then they open early just for those at risk. That's a great idea. We should do that.

But closing restaurants makes no sense because you don't have to go to restaurants. If you're at risk and you think,

I'd better sequester myself, that's fine. Don't go to a restaurant. But to ruin that person's business when many healthy people could be eating there and if they get sick, they get sick, but it's not a big deal.

In my view, where we go, the amount to which we quarantine ourselves should be up to us and not the government.

We need to assess the risk for ourselves because the risk and benefits can be different for different people. There was an elderly woman in Canada.

She wasn't permitted to see her family for almost a year and she was very depressed.

So depressed that she committed suicide with the help of her doctor, which

I guess is legal in Canada. Wouldn't it have been better to let her evaluate the benefits and possible risks of visiting with her family?

Because the worst case scenario is that she'd visit her family and she'd get sick and die.

But far more likely, she'd visit and she wouldn't get sick and there's also the possibility she'd get sick and recover.

Suicide was, you know, of all the options, suicide was the worst. But because of the reaction of the government, that was the only option available to her.

I think that's absurd. You know, many of the founding fathers of this nation risked their lives and many died because they believed that freedom was more important than their life.

As William Wallace put it, right, they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom. And it seems today we're saying, oh, please take our freedom, government, take our freedom.

Just don't take 0 .05 % of our lives. There is a document called the

Great Barrington Declaration, which if you haven't read it, I would encourage you to do so. And this was put forth by a number of infectious disease experts and signed by thousands.

And basically it's pointing out that the way we've overreacted to the virus is really absurd. And so let me read a section of this to you.

It says, as infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing

COVID -19 policies and recommend an approach we call focused protection. Coming from both the left and the right around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long term public health.

The results, to name a few, include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health, leading to greater excess mortality in years to come.

With the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden, keeping students out of school is grave injustice.

And what they do is they recommend allowing the people to normally build up an immunity to the virus through natural infection while better protecting those who are at higher risk.

We call this focused protection, they say. Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID -19.

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. I totally agree with that. I'm not an infectious disease expert, but that's just logical.

That just makes sense. You see, by locking everything down, people are not getting tested as much for heart disease, which by the way, you know, cardiac disease, that's the number one cause of death in the

United States of America. In 2018, the number of deaths due to heart disease, 655 ,381.

Now that blows away the COVID numbers, even including the comorbidities. Cancer deaths in 2018, 599 ,274.

Those are the two leading cause of deaths, heart disease and cancer. But you see, people aren't going in to get cancer screenings or to get their heart checked because they're worried about getting

COVID, which is far less lethal than either of these two. So, the main thing of what

I'm saying here is there's no basis for panic. Caution, yes. Panic, no.

I see a lot of people living in fear when you shouldn't. You shouldn't. The Lord's in control anyway.

But still, all things being equal, I'd prefer not to get sick. So the question is, is there a way to reduce my chances of getting

COVID -19? Is it preventable? And if I do get it, are there ways to reduce the symptoms?

And the answer to both of those questions is yes. Regarding the second question, the healthier you are, the better you're going to fare if you do contract the virus.

People who exercise and keep their blood sugar low and stable, people who do not smoke and therefore your lungs are in good condition, they tend to do very well.

Vitamin C has been shown to improve the immune system in general. And there's evidence that vitamin D is particularly helpful in reducing symptoms of COVID -19 because it reduces inflammation.

Inflammation is what makes COVID -19 really miserable. Not so much the virus, your body's reaction to the virus.

That's interesting. Now, of course, you can get vitamin D by spending time outdoors in the sunlight. It's produced in your skin.

You can also get it as a vitamin supplement at your grocery store. And the thing about that is there's no downside to that.

Now, those precautions don't necessarily reduce the chances that you'll get infected, but if you do get infected, it won't be as bad.

If you do get sick, NSAID pain relievers, those are non -steroidal anti -inflammatory drugs like Advil or ibuprofen.

Those can reduce inflammation and pain. And so this might be helpful to you. But how to avoid getting sick in the first place?

Any way to do that? I will say at the outset, the only way to guarantee that you don't get it is total isolation.

Completely avoid all human contact. This is a very contagious disease. So you completely isolate yourself from other human beings, that'll work.

Nothing else is foolproof. So you want to go spend six months on the International Space Station? You're good.

You can quarantine as a family, right, as long as you're all healthy to begin with. You'll stay healthy if you don't have any human contact.

And conveniently, the people most at risk, which is the elderly, are generally the most able to quarantine completely because they're usually retired.

And they're able to get food delivered through contactless delivery and so on. Whether they wish to take that precaution or not,

I believe should be up to them, not the government. For most of us, complete quarantine is not an option.

So can we reduce the chances of getting infected? And the answer is yes, we can.

Reduce it, can't eliminate it. It helps to understand how the virus is transmitted, and that's something where we've learned a lot in the last year.

First thing, coronavirus cannot penetrate healthy skin. So you can't get it by touching something.

I can stick my hand in a vial full of coronavirus. If that's all I do, as long as my skin's healthy, if there's not a wound there or something,

I'm going to be fine. So in order to infect you, the virus has to get in through one of the holes in your body, your nose, your mouth, your eyes.

So you shake hands with somebody who's infected. And just because of the little bit of sweat on his hands, you now have a little bit of virus on your hands.

So far, no problem because it can't penetrate your skin. But if you then touch your face, now you've got a problem because then there's the potential that it can get into your mouth, your nose, your eyes.

So the rule is after you shake hands, wash your hands before you touch your face or use hand sanitizer.

That works too. Rubbing alcohol 60%, 70 % or higher for 30 seconds is sufficient to render the virus inert.

There was some concern in the past about surfaces getting contaminated. That's probably a minor player.

And in any case, it isn't a problem if you wash your hands before you touch your face. The main way that people contract the virus is by airborne transmission.

Someone who is infected exhales. They put out lots of viruses, microscopic droplets of water, aerosols that contain the viruses.

And it ends up surrounding them like an invisible mist. And then you breathe in those aerosols with their viruses.

Even then, you might not become infected because your body has several lines of defense to destroy viruses before they can infect you.

There is what's called a minimum infective dose. And below that, you're not likely to have an infection.

So one or two individual viruses are probably not going to do anything. The more viruses you inhale over time, the higher the probability of getting infected.

So you can reduce your exposure by reducing the amount of time you spend around an infected individual or by increasing the distance to that individual or both.

And of course, there's some concern that a person can be infected and not know it.

Because again, some people don't show symptoms. Or maybe the symptoms haven't developed yet, but they still are

COVID positive. So that's a possibility. That's why there's this concern. How much asymptomatic transmission is there?

That's an ongoing investigation. But my point is, just by walking around on the sidewalk and passing somebody who is sick, that's not likely to do much because the exposure window is so brief.

Or talking to someone who is on the other side of the room, that's not likely to be risky at all. When a person breathes, the moisture from their exhale dissipates into the surrounding air along with any viruses they have.

And in an indoor situation, the air is relatively still. And so you can think of the virus that builds up like a cloud surrounding the person that gets thinner and thinner with distance.

And at some point, it's just not there. And so the farther away you are from someone, the lower the particle density of the virus.

And it drops as roughly 1 over the distance. So if you move twice as far away, you get half as much exposure.

There is no magic cutoff. This 6 feet thing, that's totally arbitrary. You can still get infected at 6 feet.

Aerosols disperse a lot farther than that. One researcher that I'll mention a little bit later said that aerosols can drift up to 30 meters.

That's 90 feet. Okay, so that's not the issue. The question is how much exposure are you getting?

And it decreases with increasing distance. So if you're 6 feet, you're getting only half the exposure that you would if you were 3 feet away.

Then again, you're getting twice the exposure you would if you were 12 feet away. So every time you double the distance, the exposure gets dropped by half.

So think in terms of maximizing distance and minimizing time. You could talk to someone at 3 feet for 10 minutes, or you could talk to that person at 6 feet for 20 minutes, and the exposure would be about the same.

So that gives you some idea of the risk. Now that's all assuming indoor with relatively still air.

What about outside? There really is very little risk of infection outside.

Unless you're standing right next to somebody who's infected, I would think that it would be nearly impossible to transmit an airborne virus if there's any distance between you because the slightest breeze carries all those aerosols away and disperses them into a negligible particle density.

There are at least three vaccines in the works. Just a word of caution, these vaccines use a different and new approach to vaccines that have worked well in the past and are well tested and known to be safe.

So that's just a word of caution there. Now on paper, this new approach looks really great. I don't see any specific problems with it.

It's just that biology is complicated, and sometimes there are factors we don't know about, and the fact is this is a new technique.

It hasn't really been tested before. Normally they take a virus and they basically neutralize it or weaken it, and they inject the neutralized or weakened virus into you, and your own immune system recognizes it and builds up an immunity so that when you're exposed to the real thing, the full virus, you already have antibodies ready to destroy it.

The new vaccine doesn't work that way. They're actually injecting some RNA into you. By the way, people have said, well, is this going to change my

DNA? No, the new vaccines are not going to change your DNA. That's not realistic.

But they might have some consequences, some side effects we don't know about yet because we haven't spent years testing these like we have other vaccines that are well tested and known to be safe.

So just a word of caution. You're going to have to weigh the benefits with the risk. If you're a high -risk individual, you say, well,

I've got three comorbidities, and I'm elderly, so I'm going to get that vaccine as soon as it comes out.

I could understand that. Other people might want to wait a little bit. You're going to have to weigh the risks and benefits yourself.

Okay, I think that's a good stopping point for our discussion today. So we'll pick it up next time with more information on COVID and related issues.