View from the North 40: I am redefining my comfort zone

Knowledge gives me comfort — but I think that’s true of everyone.

Think about parents with their first child. Everything the child does is interesting or worrisome, and studied for understanding. The second child is a lot more boring, and if they get up to, say, six children then that last one can be running feral in the street with grapes stuffed in its nostrils and pencil firmly grasped in one hand, and the parents are, like, “Meh, it’s OK. Kids are resilient. Remarkable creatures, really. Whatever happens will build character. Everything is a life lesson.”

I make no secret of the fact that I went to four years of college and paid 10 years of student loans just because I wanted to know stuff. But then, I kind of made a career of knowing things. Sure, everybody has to know things for a career, and I’m not saying I’m particularly smart, but I mean every job I’ve had in the last 25 years has been about finding information, answers to questions, and passing the information on to others.

I’ve found that, in times of crisis, knowledge eases my worries. I think it does for most people. For example, mechanics don’t generally worry about vehicles breaking down.

So when a coronavirus is headed my way, I review what I’ve learned of viruses and then start researching this one.

I can tell you with a great deal of assurance, that researching diseases, afflictions, germs and other medical things — as a non-medical person — is a lot like knowing that there’s no painless way to pull off a bandaid. It’s a comfort, and you can do things like soak the sticky part of the bandaid to loosen the glue, but this is not going to be pleasant.

Of course, one of the things with viruses is knowing how many particulates of virus it takes to infect a person, along with the mode of transportation for those particulates. Norovirus is transmitted from person to person through a very few particulates of virus — 18 to 100 of them — found in vomit and fecal matter. Think about that for a minute. You’re welcome.

Other viruses, like cold, flu and novel coronavirus 2019 are transmitted through mucous membrane fluid, aka spit and snot. Researchers don’t know how many particulates of coronavirus are needed to get COVID-19, but evidence is showing that you don’t have to be very intimate to be exposed to infection.

Japan’s NHK World News reported on experiments in a lab by a group of scientists from Shin Nippon Technologies Co., working on understanding not so much the disease itself, but simply the spread of aerosolized droplets.

It’s not good, folks. I mean, it’s not good to a degree that, even if COVID-19 were cured tomorrow along with influenza and the common cold, you still might want to think twice about getting within 6 feet of people, or in confined space with someone, because I’m telling you, if you do these things, you might as well cut the conversation and spend your time together spitting on each other and swapping gum.

For real.

They set up laser beams and a high-sensitivity camera in a controlled environment, aka, a big dark box, and tracked the itty bitty microcosmic droplets of moisture expelled by people.

Sure, they could measure down to 1/10,000 millimeter, but some of stuff that flew through the air could be seen with the naked eye. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen those sneezes. Those say-it-don’t-spray-it events, enhanced with a laser beam and high-sensitivity camera are the thing of nightmares.

I did some research about three years ago for a column on coughing and sneezing — and inappropriate sharing of bodily fluids emitted from the face.

The people at LiveScience.com say that one cough expels about 3,000 spit droplets, which have been clocked spraying through the air at speeds of 50 mph. You can’t run away from that fast enough.

As impressive as that sounds, a sneeze beats a cough like Usain Bolt in a foot race against the average 80-year-old. A sneeze creates about 40,000 spit droplets clocked at speeds greater than 200 mph — a speed halfway between a cheetah and a black powder bullet. Good luck.

Scientists agree those droplets can zing about 6 feet through the air and can live for hours, free-roaming through the air or waiting for you on a touchable surface. The scientists at Shin Nippon Tech. said a that the micro-droplet numbers are higher than previously thought — a cough can have up to 100,000 of them — and showed micro-droplet spread happening in real life.

The sneeze on film was bad enough, but two people, sitting together having an animated conversation as we would over, say, coffee at a table, created a non-drifting cloud of micro-droplets that hung in the air … slowly spread out from the pair like a cloud of horror film ooze.

A computer simulation showed one cough spreading like a mosquito fogger through a closed classroom-sized space with 10 people in it.

Knowledge is comfort. I am, henceforth, very comfortable being a hermit.

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See the action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPNBHuu755E&feature=youtu.be , but don’t blame me at [email protected] .