COVID

                                         IT’S NOT COOTIES!

                THE COMMON SENSE BIOPHYSICS OF COVID 19 TRANSMISSION 

COVID 19 spreads as an infectious aerosol, therefore the danger of infection is from inhaling enough exhaled breath from an infected person to constitute a infectious dose.  

THE INFECTIOUS AGENT – is not the virus itself.  A lone virus is so small that no mask would even slow it down. Viruses fill every speck of our environment from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere, even in a sample taken by the space shuttle. With each breath, you take hundreds of them into your lower respiratory system, where they have direct access to your blood stream. As a result, viruses can pass in and out of us without consequence.  Even viruses that cause diseases which you have never had may be found in your blood; and a nasal swab can sometimes test positive for COVID 19 that was simply trapped in your nose, where it gets stuck in mucous and cannot grow or infect. The infectious agent is a fog of tiny virus-containing mucous balls. In the early COVID variants, they attacked the lower respiratory system, where the infection prevented oxygenation and the virus had direct access to the blood stream, enabling it to spread all over the body. However, it was less transmissable than omicron, because nothing larger than 5 microns in size has access to the lower respiratory system. In the omicron variants, the target tissue is the upper respiratory system, where the infection is less deadly, because it does not prevent oxygenation; but it is also more transmissable, because both smaller and larger infectious mucous balls can cause the infection.   

If you want to see what the infectious fog looks like, exhale at close range onto a mirror. You make a fog of tiny droplets, mostly water, with an average size of about a micron. The fog only lasts about 10 seconds, because water droplets dry out and disappear quickly.  However, the fog of an infected person also has tiny virus-containing mucous balls which remain on the mirror, even though they are too small to see. Each infectious mucous ball is a micro-ecosystem that depends on water, like all ecosystems. The COVID 19 virus can survive a day or two on the mirror, because its bed of mucous protects it from drying out. In fact, its bed of mucous is so protective that it can survive digestive enzymes, because intact virus can be easily found in wastewater. Mucous is also what protects the digestive tract from its own enzymes.

PREVENTION  - When outside, even a slight breeze disperses the fog quickly. Vulnerable people upwind. When inside, high ceilings, open windows, and  fans can disperse the infectious fog. In a closed room, there is no safe distance, there is only a safe amount of time, because the 5% escape of breath from a person wearing an N95 mask could fill the room with enough infectious fog to infect another person wearing an N95 mask from the 5% of breath they inhale. 

TOUCH - is much less dangerous, because the infectious agent must be aerosolized to reach the target tissues in the lungs. The coronavirus does not grow in saliva or nasal epithelium, and it cannot climb down from the mouth or nose on a wall of mucous that is constantly moving upward at about 1mm per minute due to the beating of the cilia, because viruses have no motility.  The only way the virus can get down from your nose or mouth into the target tissues in your lungs is by inhaling with enough force to pull the tiny mucous balls off the wet surfaces lining your mouth or nose, which would require overcoming the forces of cohesion that stick wet things together. 

Touch can transmit partially dried up mucous balls known as “droplet nuclei” which can stay viable for about a day before they dry out and die. On non-porous surfaces like plastic and metal, they can stay viable for slightly longer; and on wet and slightly salty surfaces, like meat, fish, sweaty skin, your eyes, or your mucous membranes; they can stay viable for much longer; however, to get these infectious agents to their target tissues in your lungs, a sufficient quantity of them must be inhaled. 

CLEANING AGENTS – have generally been aimed at the wrong targets. They have mostly been directed at the capsid or lipid envelope of the virus, but those structures are protected by mucous coverings. Mucous can withstand soap and alcohol, but its disulfide bonds cannot withstand alkalai and strong bases; such as bleach, ammonia, sodium hydroxide (lye), sodium carbonate, limestone, and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).