<img height="1" width="1" alt="" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?ev=6048136207047&amp;cd[value]=0.01&amp;cd[currency]=USD&amp;noscript=1"> Why corona can spread, even with rules!
December 15, 2020
in Blogs
6 min reading time

Why corona can spread, even if we follow the rules!

Keeping 1.5 meters away only works if the air is moist enough.


Why are there more corona infections after summer? The government leads us to believe it is only because we are not complying enough, but Edsard Ravelli researched a more important factor; humidity and UV light. 1.5 meters only works if the air is humid enough. Humidity causes virus particles within 1.5 meters to fall down and not float and still cause infection in indoor spaces.


1. What does Ravelli's research involve?
2. How does coronavirus infection work?
3. What else can we do to reduce corona infections?

1) What does the Ravelli investigation entail?

Edsard Ravelli has, in his own words, demonstrated a causal relationship between air humidity and the number of coronavirus infections (e.g., there would be more infections at low air humidity). He wrote about his findings to Mark Rutte, Hugo de Jonge and His Royal Highness Willem Alexander, among others. Professor Jeffrey Shaman wrote a paper in 2009 about airborne viruses and concluded that the lower the humidity, the higher the risk of respiratory infections.

Ravelli replicated this conclusion with Dutch figures
He collected data from:

1. RIVM with the number of positives tested, number of hospitalizations and mortality rates by municipality;
2. KNMI for data from 37 monitoring stations across the Netherlands over the past 20 years and access to current weather data from those stations. Here, humidity, wind direction and solar radiation (UV light) proved to be very important in predicting the spread of influenza viruses. (e.g., influenza and SARS)
3. CBS for data related to population movement behavior
4. NIVEL, a public knowledge organization supervised by RIVM, for data on influenza per municipality per week over the past five years.

He had two universities analyze this data to see if there was a causal relationship and a causal relationship between the data, without them knowing what kind of data it was.

All analyses showed that a causal relationship could be established between air humidity and virus infections spread by droplets in the air.

By modelling this, he managed to predict the number of coronas infections (based on hospital admissions and mortality) with 95% accuracy, according to Ravelli.

2 How does infection by a coronavirus work?

First of all, what is the difference between a virus and a bacterium?
A bacterium is a living organism and grows by dividing itself. A virus is not a living organism and consists of RNA or DNA. A virus actually works just like a computer virus: it enters your body like a virus enters your computer's operating system. There it issues commands to change things. If a virus enters your mucosa through your nose/throat, you can compare it to a virus going through the firewall. Sometimes the firewall can stop the virus like a snotty nose or throat also sometimes manages to stop a virus. The deeper the virus penetrates your mucous membranes, and then gets into your vulnerable lungs, the more damage it can do because the firewall here is no longer as strong.
Once the virus is through the mucosa, it can attach itself to the cells like a usb stick, with its spikes. You can think of this spike, of protein as a kind of garden hose that attaches itself to the cells. From then on, the virus can start giving the cells a command. For example, to start dividing. From the moment the cells are infected with the virus, those cells start giving orders to other cells. This is called replication. And so the virus spreads in your body and more and more cells become infected.

What is the difference between influenza and corona.
Both influenza (which causes flu) and SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19 ) are envelope viruses. That is, they have a kind of spacesuit on and inside that is the RNA and DNA. In coronavirus there is RNA and in a flu virus there is DNA.
A flu virus has an incubation period of 1 to 3 days. Within three days, you get symptoms.
The coronavirus has an incubation period of 5 to 6 days, this is because it is a new virus and our body does not recognize it yet. Because of this, it takes longer for the body to show a reaction. This is why people stay around longer like a flu virus without knowing about it; however, 2 to 3 days before you have symptoms you are already contagious.
Most are sick for 2 to 3 weeks, after which it can still go wrong and you end up in the hospital. In the worst cases, people die, and this is on average 5 weeks after the first symptoms of illness.

So there are 3 transmission routes:

  1. Direct contact: that's why you shouldn't shake hands;
  2. Through big drops: that's why we have to keep 1,5 meters distance;
  3. Via small droplets (aerosols): this is why we need to humidify and ventilate the air.

    Humidity is needed for 1.5 meters to be safe.

Air can contain only a limited amount of moisture, with the amount of moisture depending on temperature.
We usually only notice that moisture (water vapor) is contained when it cools and the windows fog up. Colder air can contain less water vapor than warmer air.
Our lungs, throat and nose are moist, and the virus droplets that are there if one is infected contain a relatively large amount of water. This makes it relatively large and heavy and therefore falls to the ground within 1.5 meters. Therefore, we must keep the 1.5 meters distance to avoid infection.
At the moment when the air is very dry, a large virus droplet, which may contain as many as 100,000 water droplets, can burst. Then it becomes very light and starts to float.
When the moisture outside is as humid as your breath, the water has nowhere to go and then the big drop falls to the ground. When it is dry then the water drop breaks up and gets into the air, where it can spread. Ventilation is then not even always enough anymore. So it is more important to keep the humidity high so there are no or fewer infected small virus particles in the air.

3 What else can we do to reduce corona infections?

Because from October onwards the sunlight is insufficient and the humidity is too low to positively influence the spread of the virus, it is important to place humidifiers, preferably with UV lamps, in homes, schools, public buildings, health care institutions (and soon also in the hospitality industry when it is allowed to open again).
Also, the heating is on more and more of which the air becomes dry and it is necessary that you humidify even more. The smaller your space, the less you need to humidify. The larger the room, the larger the humidifier should be.
Opening a window often does not help enough to increase the humidity in the house: the outside air in winter can actually be colder and therefore drier than inside.are and therefore drier than the air inside. Tools are often used to increase humidity in the home. For example, a bowl of water or wet tea towel near the heater. However, these aids do not help enough to achieve the optimal humidity of about 50%.
A safe margin for relative humidity depends on the (room) temperature.
For example, at 21 degrees the relative humidity should be 50%,
At 18 degrees the humidity should be 65%.

The moister the air is, the moister your mucous membrane is: this also makes your firewall work better to stop the virus.
Humidification helps not only for the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19, but also for the common flu.

 

The Covid-19 tests can be found via this link

Measuring infections at your company location:click here

 

references:
https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-20-06-covid-0302
Effect on Coronavirus of microdroplets and humidity explained by Edsard Ravelli at Potkaars (podcast)
https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/609021071.pdf:
"Effects of low RH on the nose and throat.
At 10% RH, the cellular activity of nasal mucosa decreases and they become dry (Sunwoo et
al., 2006). This increases the risk of contracting respiratory infection. Also at play here
that the survival time of certain viruses, including the influenza virus, increases at an RH
below 40% (Schaffer et al., 1976). Subjective observations show that dryness of nose and
throat at RHs of 30% and below is only observed after 90 minutes".
About the Author
Ellen is the founder of Blood Value Testing. She gained her experience with health examinations for companies, schools and government institutions at HumanCapitalCare arbo- en gezondheidsdienst. In 2009 she became director of Diagnostics Netherlands, a collaboration between all major general practitioner laboratories in the Netherlands. At the U- Diagnostics laboratory in Utrecht, she was responsible for blood testing at GPs. Until she founded Blood Values Test for individuals in 2013.
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