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Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

helpwithcovid.com

121–130 of 218 posts

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#121
post #45

Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home. A lot of us have the amazing comfort…

Are there good tips for doing this safely? Should I wipe down all the items? Ideally they could do so themselves.

to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables.

a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish.

This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools), I got it from here https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/8340/970-216-Disi...

I just looked at a generic bottle of bleach I bought at a chain pharmacy to see if they listed the concentration, and even better, they listed various measures as above for different uses as above, so if you look there it might be the most convenient system.

source:

in normal times, the board of health requires restaurants in new york city (but probably everywhere) to keep a bucket of chlorinated water (essentially diluted laundry bleach) around with rags in it to wipe off tables with bare hands in between customers. I infer from this factoid that it must be a good, safe way to disinfect things, so I mention it if you were looking for a way to wipe things down simply and reliably.

obviously, you want to get the concentration right so the chlorine doesn't become a health risk itself (or bleach your jeans) so I'll try to look that up now, and I found the above link from the State of Washington.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#122
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors I live in a densely packed city. I have no idea who lives in my neighborhood. I would be glad to help anyone at anytime though. I am just not clear how to go about it.

Have you tried Nextdoor?

yeah i was on there in the past but it was too noisy with some people dominating every topic. there were lots of negative vibes and was ruining my mood.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#123
post #78

I realize this is probably a work in progress, but as a suggestion, it would really benefit from better navigation: - Sorting (particularly by # of volunteers, to find ones that aren't filled up) - Searching by string - Maybe tags that can be searched by? (skillsets wanted, etc.) - Projects could list an estimated number of needed volunteers; "Does 86 mean they don't need any more?" Overall, excellent idea and it loo…

Yeah, it seems weird that the default presentation is to put the projects with the most volunteers at the top.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#124
post #45

Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home. A lot of us have the amazing comfort…

I joined a community group that is doing just this, and as an hour ago have a list of older neighbors to check in on, and possibly help with obtaining food and medications. I do wonder if at 39 i am in fact young enough to be in the most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed group.

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c...

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#126
post #45

Please consider reaching out to your elderly neighbors and offering your time to gather groceries/supplies for them. Or posting a note near the entrance of your apartment complex with your number. This alone will have a huge impact. They have a very real chance of dying if they contract covid-19. Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you could not safely leave your home. A lot of us have the amazing comfort…

People have been setting up mutual aid and volunteer groups to do just this. If you’d like to find one in your local area we’ve built a directory for them: https://coronavolunteer.org Helping in your local community (safely) will be one of the most important things you can do in the coming months.

Have you seen https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/volunteering?

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there good tips for doing this safely? Should I wipe down all the items? Ideally they could do so themselves.

to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables. a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish. This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools),…

Well I do have some isopropyl alcohol. I've been using it sparingly but it's lasting me longer than I expected.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#128
post #22

I have an idea to increase viral RNA test throughput (PCR) by 46.5 times using a binary encoding scheme that I hope someone here might be able to validate/invalidate. Sorry for the thread jack, but I tried posting this yesterday but didn't get picked up. https://wet-robots.ghost.io/how-to-increase-covid-19-testing...

I do custom applications for a liquid handling robotics company.

Nucleotide extraction and amplification are some of the most common contemporary applications of modern liquid handling robots. Cherry-picking or sorting of samples is also a technique that is common and well within the functionaltiy of these robots.

To avoid cross-contamination, diagnostic samples are typically not mixed and handled in discrete wells with sample specific disposable pipette tips. In a scenario where throughput/cost/reagent scarcity are important and false-positives (without severe symptoms) are low-risk I think your suggestion absolutely has merit. I am going to run this by our diagnostics specialist for further review.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to wipe down and disinfect (if the bleach is 2.75% strength, otherwise adjust accordingly) use 1 gallon water with 1 tablespoon unscented laundry bleach for eating utensils or 1 gallon water with 6 tablespoons bleach for surfaces like tables. a gallon is 213 tablespoons so your ratio is about 200 to 1 for eating utensils vs 30 to one for surfaces, so that's metric-ish. This is "child safe" (like for nursery schools),…

Well I do have some isopropyl alcohol. I've been using it sparingly but it's lasting me longer than I expected.

nothing wrong with the disinfectant property of strong concentrations of alcohol, but I assume institutional food service type places are told to use diluted bleach because it is not flammable and is safe and stable (not evaporatey) to sit for periods of time in an open bucket.

Re: Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers

#130

Here at https://www.coronawiki.org we are also looking for help. I am Dr. Riciu Andrei, board certified dermatologist with a strong interest in infectious diseases I put together a team of medical professionals, researchers, programmers and data scientists and we're trying to create the most accurate Coronavirus / COVID-19 resource (data stats and accurate medical information). With this project I am trying to help a…

Hi Riciu. This looks like a very promising resource. One constructive comment: your dashboards could benefit from some text above clarifying things like [i]some countries test more symptomatic people than others [ii]recoveries are much lower because recovery takes time and in most places most of the cases are new etc [iii] many cases are undocumented. And possibly linking to your articles on the same subject.

This may be clear to you, but perhaps not to some people using the data to assess the relative safety of their country or age group.

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