31–40 of 126 posts
UV-C lights that irradiate an air duct is literally the most surprising (and in retrospect obvious) thing I learnt today. Is this something a household HVAC could be upgraded to. Do HNers in areas that have air con think it's a "yeah people will want that" idea?
Just vent it out in the open air and not on people.
What X is large enough to ensure that all the virus particles you cough out end up at the collector? Is it possible to do this without electrocuting everyone?
UV-C lights that irradiate an air duct is literally the most surprising (and in retrospect obvious) thing I learnt today. Is this something a household HVAC could be upgraded to. Do HNers in areas that have air con think it's a "yeah people will want that" idea?
UV-C lights that irradiate an air duct is literally the most surprising (and in retrospect obvious) thing I learnt today. Is this something a household HVAC could be upgraded to. Do HNers in areas that have air con think it's a "yeah people will want that" idea?
There's evidence that people that have been exposed to previous, weaker, coronaviruses are more likely to have mild responses to Covid-19, for example.
> ultraviolet-C disinfection technology for air purification systems that were installed in health care facilities, factories, and NASA space capsules. Today, this technology is being used in Shanghai, Moscow, and New York City to protect subway and bus passengers against SARS-CoV-2, and China is also using the technology to disinfect hospitals Russian FSB has just arrested (on secret state security charges) on his s…
Unfortunately, air purifiers have embraced the situation by demanding luxury pricing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since eradicating the virus has become impossible, most national governments are currently pursuing a herd immunity strategy by default. They're just doing it at slightly different rates. In the USA the current daily rate of confirmed new cases is about 43000, not 55000. However there are a large number of "dark matter" cases not counted in official statistics. About 40% of infections are asymptomatic, and many more…
What countries are actually following a strategy to reach herd immunity by having "enough" people fall ill and hopefully recover (having "recovered" does not preclude persisting damages btw!)? Most countries are rather waiting for a vaccine to become available and try to minimize the number of sick and dead in the meantime without interfering with economy too much. (54.4k was number of newly confirmed cases on friday…
It will continue to circulate in the population, just in a less explosive manner. This also means it is possible we will never reach herd immunity in some absolute sense much like we haven't for other coronaviruses.
It seems the reasoning by officials is, "Yes, it's airborne, but there's not enough N95 masks for everyone so we don't want to cause panic or an N95 mask shortage for doctors and nurses by admitting it's airborne."
Also supposedly if a disease is declared airborne then hospitals have to adopt various isolation measures beyond just N95 that are very costly. This may be the reason the powers that be won't announce airborne transmission until after the pandemic is over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We make fun of medieval medicine but look at this shit! We're pretending that saying some magic words has an effect on a physical reality of disease spread! Who says that saying its airborne "has" to mean that certain procedures have to be adopted? That's not a rule of the universe, it's a rule that humans came up with and agreed upon and humans have the power to fix. We distilled down a set of physical principles in…
While I understand the frustration, the reality is we shouldn’t be making fun of either. Just because the end result of something is inarguably “stupid” does not mean that any of the things that went into it are “stupid.” To do the Hacker News thing and make a bad analogy to computer science topics in a totally irrelevant thread, this is how I view a lot of stuff people complain about these days (think JavaScript, or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why bother to disinfect when you can ventilate? Air with pathogens out, fresh air without pathogens in. (Regarding herd immunity: you're aware that at the current rate of 55000 people per day, it would take 10 years to infect 60% of 320 million people? Nothing to say of the countless casualties that you would get in the process.)
Since eradicating the virus has become impossible, most national governments are currently pursuing a herd immunity strategy by default. They're just doing it at slightly different rates. In the USA the current daily rate of confirmed new cases is about 43000, not 55000. However there are a large number of "dark matter" cases not counted in official statistics. About 40% of infections are asymptomatic, and many more…
It seems the reasoning by officials is, "Yes, it's airborne, but there's not enough N95 masks for everyone so we don't want to cause panic or an N95 mask shortage for doctors and nurses by admitting it's airborne."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/ski-party-pa...
Turns out the "don't close borders" advice was a cached thought related to a plague outbreak in India over 25 years ago, and welded in place by politics.