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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

So he claims that he got it despite practicing all the social distancing protocols, hand-washing, etc.

Has anyone calculated what are the probabilities of infection in an area with an active infection cluster while practicing social-distancing and other hygiene measures?

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I don’t know but I’ve become aware of just how difficult it is to remain pristine. Touch a door handle? After that did you touch your phone, keys or wallet at the store? Did you touch your car door handle? When you washed your hands, did you disinfect the faucet handle and soap dispenser after? It’s always a game of percentages even when you’re careful.

In order to be infected from a door handle, somebody the last few seconds had to sneeze in his hand, touch the handle, you'd have to really touch the whole handle and then take the hand to your mouth/nose. It is unlikely. They find virus RNA on surfaces but it is not activate. Infections from surfaces are vastly overestimated. Staying and talking with an infectious person in a room is underestimated.

There's the simple expedient of 1) touching potentially contaminated stuff only with your left hand, 2) only touching clean stuff with your right hand, and 3) never cross contaminating your left and right hands. And whenever you can, wash or use 70% alcohol. When I'm out, I always carry a paper towel soaked in 70% isopropanol in my right hand, and periodically wipe my left hand.

There's a lot of history to this left hand, right hand protocol. I'm assuming you do it in this tradition, or at least as a nod to it?

Yes, of course.

I also have decades of muscle memory with using disposable gloves in a lab context, but that's not so useful when you don't have 100 gloves per day to burn through. But even so, I'm always conscious of what I've touched when, and with what.

That's the tough part - not touching things that other people touch or ensuring that you sanitize your hands after. A new CDC study claims this coronavirus can survive for hours on shoes, wall, floors, etc.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article

Like you say, it's a game of percentages. The only way to completely eliminate the possibility of infection to yourself personally is to stay inside and live off whatever you've managed to stock up on for supplies. Not exactly practical and likely not sustainable for long.

This would be an awesome opportunity for AR-based training.

Imagine being able to "see" the simulated virus in the air and on surfaces. See it spread due to airflow and gravity, see it diminish over time due to sunlight, surface cleaning, etc.

Yes. It's extremely hard. Clothes are especially hard. I have to take my dog out two times a day and I always try to use the same shoes and same hoodie for this activity. I wash them every other day, but that's a half-baked hygiene measure.

In reality, the only way to be safe is to always wash all your clothing every time you go out, but with a dog, I find that pretty hard.

I mean, you'd also have to wash your dog, right?

I clean his paws after we go out but yeah, the vectors of contamination are infinite.

> In reality, the only way to be safe is to always wash all your clothing every time you go out, but with a dog, I find that pretty hard.

Quarantining the exposed clothes is a better method IMHO, just setup a FIFO of quarantine bins. Add sunlight if possible. I've been using 2-3 days personally, depending on what it is.

Just brushing rapidly against any of those surfaces can potentially aerosolize it as well. Not to mention that the radius of air-borne transmission route keeps changing. And on top of that we haven't got a lot of data on other vectors like food.

> Touch a door handle?

Like... with your hand? Not in a glove that you throw out immediately? I just can't fathom touching a door handle.

I saw someone just open a door at a public place the other day and it was utterly baffling to see.

Billions of people in affected areas do it every day...

Those numbers probably aren't knowable at this time. Over the last day I've seen stories that claim person to person transmission is twice as likely as previously thought but transmission via an object is much less likely than previously thought. Wouldn't be surprise if tomorrow there were stories claiming the exact opposite. It feels like we're both drowning and dying of thirst when it comes to information. But this crisis has not really been going on for very long. We have become so accustomed to getting information instantly that it's going to feel like an eternity before we get data that we are confident in strongly.

Two things I'd like to share on the topic of how easily covid infections are transmitted:

A Washington state choir decided to go ahead with their practice on March 6th. There were no handshakes or hugs, everyone was given hand sanitizer on the way in. 45 members contracted COVID-19, 2 died. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...

#2: This video was posted on /r/Coronavirus/ and was pretty interesting. It's got some visualizations of how micro droplets remain suspended in air: https://vimeo.com/402577241

Spitting on each other is a pretty big risk. Also they were heavily biased toward vulnerable elderly.

Note that the protocol was followed for the "previous two weeks". The incubation period can easily be two weeks[1], so the infection could have happened earlier.

That said, more than 98% of corona cases involve fever[2] so this might have been something else.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-sympto...

98% of hospitalized patients had fever. Not all infections as per the link you cite.

Interesting, earlier reporting said that it frequently presented without a fever. I know that now they basically won’t even test you if you don’t have a fever. I wonder what’s correct.

https://www.mcknights.com/news/clinical-news/new-data-leads-...

Except the grocery runs.

>A had taken a few hikes, grocery store and takeout runs.

It is the worst possible place you could go. People touching everything, air not circulating well.

The alternative is starvation though. Hardly compelling.

I guess you can wear gloves? But then you still have to wipe everything you bought down when you get home.

> the alternative is starvation

Is there not a middle ground of food delivery? Nonperishable foods can sit out for several days before use, significantly reducing the risk.

Likewise with wiping everything down when you get home. Supposedly soap is effective - it's not difficult to soak everything in soapy water. You can't completely eliminate all risk but you can certainly mitigate it.

Food delivery services are overwhelmed in many areas. It's better that those of us in good health continue doing our own shopping, and leave the available delivery slots for customers at higher risk.

Worst possible place you can go? Even the hospital? Even a homeless shelter?

The point is to slow it down, not actually know which ritual failed.

We aren't worried about how you or I really get it, it doesn't matter if it actually was carried by a supernatural deity following certain people around or if someone has a death note that uses 5g radio waves to target individuals in the phone book. We only know that crowds and ignoring hygeine carry it faster and we just need time to treat it.

If you are personally in an at-risk group and are avoiding it like the plague that it is, none of the policies have real answers you. We are operating on probabilities, not absolutes.

My understanding was the social distancing won't actually prevent everyone from getting covid19, it'll just slow it down so that we don't all get it at once. Most people will end up with it.

So given that, I'd say the changes are nearly 0%.

To actually keep infections to a minimum, we need to actually quarantine, but (again, my understanding) that will have too many other negative effects, and the economic hardships could actually kill more people than the disease would have.

So much this. And I wish people would understand this concept. We are going to get hyperinflation now, US dollars will become worthless soon, and the social safety net will disappear. This is going to cause a lot more societal grief than corona.

That isn't something you can quantify. By all means take reasonable steps to avoid infection, but the most likely outcome is that no matter what we do the majority of us will be infected before a vaccine is available. There are already four other endemic coronaviruses which circulate in humans and SARS-CoV-2 is going to be the fifth.

https://patch.com/california/losgatos/bay-area-s-dr-fauci-ex...

holy shit, might as well just go out and enjoy your life

Quite enjoying my life while staying in actually.

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