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10 Things You Must Know About Viruses and COVID19


YES, THIS CAN HELP YOU FIGHT COVID19 AND UNDERSTAND VIRUSES BETTER!

10 things I have learnt about viruses from my interactions with doctors and from the world's leading universities over many years.

1. The mortality rate from viruses reduce with time.

In case of CoVID19 though it's too early to say, yet there is already good news coming in. A research that came out yesterday https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/how-high-is-the-kill-rate-of-covid-19-heres-what-a-new-study-found/articleshow/74925141.cms believes that the real mortality rate from this virus might just be 0.66% instead of the 2.6% feared previously.

Good news because looking at the high rates of death in Italy, Spain etc many people have been really frightened and thinking maybe the death rates are 10% plus... Some friends are telling me it's 50% given the number of discharged and closed cases in Italy and no deaths are almost equal.

But serious researchers aren't  getting carried away by such figures. Because they know how these figures are coming. 

Different nations are approaching it differently. South Korea and Germany as I wrote earlier have amongst the highest tests per million so they have significantly less death rates. Japan has told it's citizens not bother doctors unless they have a fever for 4 days. So their cases would be very low. In one of the world's most ageing country, Italy, the average age of people who have reported to be infected is 50+ and about 50% with existing health conditions..so in any case, their chances of survival go down. In China, they have only recently started counting the cases which have CoVID19 but don't have symptoms. In India, we have done only 45k tests to date, which in Germany they do as many every two days. If we were to follow South Korea's test rate per million by now we should have conducted 8 million tests. 

So the number of cases in every country is unknown and in many countries, even the death count isn't correct. The researchers have tried to take all this into account and come to the figures. 

2. As I have been saying in all my article from day one, heat and humidity can make viruses less effective/make it tougher for them to travel. And therefore if you see Africa despite its huge Chinese population hasn't yet got that affected by CoVid 19, nor has India been despite its very late response.
In fact, a leading Indian doctor already believes that there is:

While the above remains yet to be proven, the fact is paradoxically, actually, humidity stops viruses from spreading in general. A humid environment creates multiple walls of water particles that act as impregnable nets stopping the microscopic mucus particles carrying the virus. People think that a dry environment will kill the virus. On the contrary in a dry environment, the virus travels farther in a short period of time before dying (but therefore that infects more around). In a humid environment, it is not able to travel long distances but it lives for a longer time on all flat surfaces where it has settled down due to combining with water particles. 


3. Droplet transmission through the air causes significantly more infections than surface transmission. So a face mask when with a group of people around is totally useful 
(Face masks: can they slow coronavirus spread – and should we be wearing them? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/face-masks-coronavirus-covid-19-public?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WhatsApp )
 though it is of limited protection. 

You need eye protectors as well. 

4. Mouth and eyes are the two most vulnerable parts through which viruses enter the human body. 

Viruses entering through the nose is much tougher than entering through the eyes or mouth.. Viruses find it problematic to enter through the nose, because of the protective proteins in mucus that are significantly successful in reducing the entry of bacteria and viruses. Similar reasons the ear is protected to a large extent, due to the protective sheath of ear wax. 

5. It's important to not only wash hands regularly so that the touch doesn't transfer viruses to the mouth or eyes, it's really important to wash the face regularly and brush more often, especially before going to sleep.

The reason is just because you have touched your face doesn't mean it has entered your body. 

Viruses regularly follow quorum sensing when they are in your mouth or eyes. They don’t go immediately inside your body. They talk to each other to sense whether they have enough numbers before entering the body.
As you will read in the virus section, Arbitrium has recently been described in bacteriophages infecting several Bacillus species. The viruses communicate with each other to ascertain their own density compared to potential hosts. They use this information to decide whether to enter a lytic or lysogenic life-cycle

So they first sit and multiply before they are ready to enter and attack because if they are less in number, they will be easily killed off by the antibodies. Yes, It’s crazy but they do communicate and it can be observed under a microscope.

While viruses can’t travel on their own from cheeks to eyes, they can live on your cheek and even multiply on your skin, similar to Papilloma and Herpesviruses, that you can catch through direct skin contact with infected people. So the need to wash hands regularly. And even taking bath twice a day, especially at night.

Washing your face regularly kills the virus in case it hadn't yet entered. Similarly brushing in the night makes sure they don't get 9 hours of free time to multiply.

People don’t realize that the reason they carry the virus for a few days without showing symptoms is because of this quorum-sensing behaviour

Most of the infections occur in people who don’t brush at night and don’t wash their face at night. Crazy, but true. As the virus finds a good 8-9 hours to multiply


6. That's the reason, never fall for stupid suggestions like taking steam to kill viruses. 

The level of heat in steam varies. Most of the steam is water vapour at above-average room temperature, which is far from 100 degrees centigrade (true temperature for steam). This mostly happens because of steam coming out of the device and losing heat instantly. 

How does steam help? It pushes the mucus in your sinuses inside your throat, which is quite required for extreme congestion cases (so that it doesn’t go into your lungs) but should not be used by healthy individuals

If the virus was stuck in your nostrils, and you took steam, you are giving it a free pass inside

7. Remain fit in general. Fat is fodder for viruses. In laboratory tests, viruses attach characteristically to sugar structures of the host cells," which means it would grow extremely fast inside people with excess fat. For fat is nothing else but sugar.

8. Sunlight induced Vitamin D in your body fights viruses. While vaccines haven't come out for Coronavirus, the least we can do is increase the natural vitamin D levels in our body as a shield.

The advantage of standing in sunlight is that the production of natural inactive vitamin D exponentially increases. In the presence of viral infection, lung epithelial cells are able to convert inactive vitamin D to active vitamin D, which in turn produces an increased amount of cathelicidin, which is one of the strongest natural compounds that break down the protein shell of all coronaviruses.

Unfortunately, the vitamin D from supplements is not (and we don't know why) processed by lung epithelial cells.

So it's important to get the natural Vitamin D from sunlight

Not many people know that it's the ultraviolet range in the sunlight which reacts with a lipoprotein (cholesterol, if you may) in your blood to give the inactive form of Vitamin D3, which becomes active in most cases instantly to support your body's metabolism, but some amounts are stored by the body in various places for future days when you might not get sunlight.

So there are two things. The sunlight inside the house is of no use as glass which is transparent cancels the UV into V and the body is not able to metabolise the lipoprotein. So you need to be outside. 

9. Viruses keep mutating and coming back with different strains. So it's important that around Sept every year we consult our doctors and take the latest vaccination that encompasses most of the common dangers. Every day on an average 2000 people die from common flu around the globe and more than half a million people get infected. We just think we won't die because the death rates are 0.1%, but it's still significant. Old people aren't vaccinated mostly against pneumonia. Just today a report came out that says https://m.economictimes.com/news/science/us-scientists-link-bcg-vaccination-with-fewer-covid-19-cases-indian-scientists-hopeful-but-cautious/articleshow/74931591.cms

Taking vaccinations seriously is very important.

10.  Finally, while immunity can't be overnight increased with green tea or lime water, a good night's sleep can. If you want to be sure that your body isn't a magnet for viruses, you must sleep well every night instead of stressing about CoVID19.

I HOPE THIS WAS HELPFUL. 
SHARE, PLEASE DO.


Comments

Unknown said…
Sir, Lot of thanks to you, regarding COVID-19, yes I always maintain distancing and rapidly alarms along with family members.
Anusha said…
Are you interest to take RTPR Test, then radolabs
lab test chennai is the best option for you... Our TAT time is as low as 8 hrs...

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