If you are going to donate them I would suggest local hospitals or urgent cares might put them to best use.
I wish we had managed to get some hand sanitizer, we only managed to find travel sized ones before shtf.
Do you expect transmission to occur within your house? From a guest? Or at a grocery store or outside contact? Seems like it would only help in the in-house case. I expect this to be pretty far down the list of useful interventions
Household transmission In China, human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 virus is largely occurring in families. The Joint Mission received detailed information from the investigation of clusters and some household transmission studies, which are ongoing in a number of Provinces. Among 344 clusters involving 1308 cases (out of a total 1836 cases reported) in Guangdong Province and Sichuan Province, most clusters (78%-85%) have occurred in families. Household transmission studies are currently underway, but preliminary studies ongoing in Guangdong estim...
Maybe it's optimistic, but in my model of the world, there are islands of competence within the intelligence community which do things like this.
For me, that fits my model of what the US intelligence agencies used to do during the cold war times, and we have unclassified documents about proactive, unethical experimentation they did - like Operation Sea Spray and MK Ultra. I don't know if the 2020 US intelligence community is up to the same task. I get the impression that capability and competence have fallen there, although it's hard to kn...
I bought soylent along with rice, beans, dried mushrooms, dried vegetables, cured sausage, etc. I think soylent is useful but I wouldn't want to consist on it fully.
Thank you for your input. I would like to go but I want to bring my partner with me and she is against it, I think because it feels extreme. My brother thinks it would be dangerous to my parents to travel to them, my father thinks it is inevitable to get the virus everywhere so it would be useless to travel to them. It feels like each is uncomfortable with taking action and justifying that feeling with a different faux-logical screen.
Sigh. I'd like to go and I'll work on convincing my partner. We went out for dinner today which strengthens my...
I discovered a way to practice this recently, I was drawing with vine charcoal, which is dark and very dusty, and I got dark dust all over my hands. Then I touched my face inadvertantly and I could see in the mirror where I had touched.
Later I tried to wash it off and was able to wash it off only when I really focused on how I moved my hands in order to scrub any area. The entire thing felt like good practice with hand higene. So to practice this, improvise a colored dust - charcoal, ash etc, and practice washing hands and not touching face.
The aim of your quarantine procedure and other actions should be to delay your exposure to coronavirus until after the peak has passed. It is unlikely to be possible to delay it indefinitely, especially if we are going to have a return to normalcy.
With every epidemic there is likely to be a peak - a period of exponential growth, climaxing in a peak and then a slowdown. Your goal should be to get exposed after the peak period. During the peak, medical supplies will be stretched very thin and hospitals may be overflowing. After the peak, medical profession...
So the SARS virus exhibits, at least in the lab, Antibody Dependent Enhancement which is what can allow a virus to affect you multiple times. Here's a paper on it. Since COVID-19 is related to SARS it seems plausible the reports of reinfection are real. I don't understand this enough to say much more about it.
TLDR You may be able to use a rice cooker, instant pot or pressure cooker to sanitize disposable masks after wearing them, although this will slightly damage the mask.
Due to the worldwide mask shortage, it seems inevitable that many people are going to have to reuse masks. Personally I have 2 masks per member of my household which seems troubling low.
It may be possible to decontaminate masks - I found a paper that reviewed 5 mask decontamination methods, both a review of how they affected the mask, and a review of how effective they were at decontaminati...
I have read many reports from people in Wuhan and there is food in the grocery stores. Actually it seems like no currently effected area has a permanent food shortage - there is a run on the stores and then they are full after a restock. However, shopping requires you to leave your house so you will want to minimize it. I think people are over-focusing on food shopping because it feels actionable. You are right that there is almost no downside
I've been struggling with the question of whether I should leave the SF area to go to my parent''s house in the suburbs of Virginia, and I expect other people are facing similar conundrums. I'll share my thoughts on it below and would welcome any advice especially anything that I have not considered.
Background: My parents (both 50 - 60) live in a detached house in the Virginia suburbs. It's very large with 3 floors and many bedrooms and has an inlaw unit. I currently live with 3 roommates, one of whom is my partner, in a tiny ap...
If I had to chose a place to go to, I might choose Singapore. They clearly have some cases but they are also seem to have their act together more than any other country. They have published some amazing contact-tracing graphs and seem to have managed to get ahead of the virus and contain it in a way other countries have not. I visited it this summer and left very impressed. It is a totalitarian city-state with a government that seems to try to do it's very best to do a good job, and errs on the side of being overprotective/overbearing.
It feels lik...
I read a paper which said no significant difference between surgical mask and N95 mask for protecting healthcare workers from influenza.
Edit: Here's the paper!
That seems useful. You forgot one of the most commonly touched items - phones and computers. I am gonna put tape on the back of my phone case and my laptop.
I have often remarked "If we had viable third parties in this country, and there was a party that held no policy positions whatsoever but just vowed to make government more efficient, I would vote for them every time". I feel that this is the forgotten element in so many things. We argue between American health-insurance healthcare and single-payer healthcare, but I believe both systems could be really good if they were run efficiently, and both systems could be horrific abominations if they are run inefficiently.
I really wish politician... (read more)