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 Sqorgar wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfaces.html

A new analysis found that the virus can remain viable in the air for up to 3 hours, on copper for up to 4 hours, on cardboard up to 24 hours and on plastic and stainless steel up to 72 hours.

It does go on to clarify that touching contaminated surfaces isn't thought to be the main way it's being transferred, but nobody's really sure yet. And, obviously, the chances of touching something contaminated would go up as the actual number of infected people goes up.

The experiments in this study are done under a controlled climate - 20-23C with humidity at 40% - which presumably would emulate a typical indoor environment. So these numbers wouldn't be applicable to an outdoor setting, with temperatures are outside this norm and UV radiation bombarding everything.

It's also worth pointing out that the numbers do drop over this time in a linear fashion, such that 50% hours later, there would be 50% the amount of virus. I just skimmed the study, but I didn't see if it went into how much virus was necessary to actually infect someone. So it would stand to logic that your chance of infection shrinks over time, with some point well before the maximum time that infection becomes a trivial concern.

Exactly. Plus, you have airflow to disperse any potential virus and dilute it. That's why they're telling people at work to keep. Windows and doors open.

 ScarletRose wrote:

Crispy78 wrote:
One of the sites I work at occasionally is a cosmetics manufacturing laboratory, and their toilet has a special door handle that automatically jizzes a load of antibac gel into your hand when you pull it. No-one warned me it did that, was a nice little surprise...

Why not just a motion sensor mounted next to the door?

My workplace has everything in the restroom on motion sensors - faucets, soap dispenser, paper towels and doors. So you don't actually need to touch anything.

It means it's enforced. You literally can't open the door without getting a handful of hand sanitizer.

That thing I was asking about is for agency sanitation workers. The full time contract staff have been told to stay away from the depot as much as possible but agency workers are at the same time being ordered to report in, and then come back and hang around in confined spaces until clocking out time. An offer to ring in and clock out when the run is finished was rejected. FYI, the bosses giving these orders are doing so from the safety of their own homes. I’ve been told that they’re considered expendable.

This also has the “unintended” consequence that contract workers are deliberately dumping their work onto these agency workers in order to get home early, still on the clock, still on full pay.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfaces.html

A new analysis found that the virus can remain viable in the air for up to 3 hours, on copper for up to 4 hours, on cardboard up to 24 hours and on plastic and stainless steel up to 72 hours.

It does go on to clarify that touching contaminated surfaces isn't thought to be the main way it's being transferred, but nobody's really sure yet. And, obviously, the chances of touching something contaminated would go up as the actual number of infected people goes up.

The experiments in this study are done under a controlled climate - 20-23C with humidity at 40% - which presumably would emulate a typical indoor environment. So these numbers wouldn't be applicable to an outdoor setting, with temperatures are outside this norm and UV radiation bombarding everything.

It's also worth pointing out that the numbers do drop over this time in a linear fashion, such that 50% hours later, there would be 50% the amount of virus. I just skimmed the study, but I didn't see if it went into how much virus was necessary to actually infect someone. So it would stand to logic that your chance of infection shrinks over time, with some point well before the maximum time that infection becomes a trivial concern.

Exactly. Plus, you have airflow to disperse any potential virus and dilute it. That's why they're telling people at work to keep. Windows and doors open.

Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

With genuine respect to all posters, I don’t really know anyone on Dakka from Adam. That means I need to consider any advice on here as both from a knowledgeable source, and the worst kind of ‘4 the lulz’ troll.

So take it on board, and compare to sources I should be able to trust, as their qualification can be verified. Especially because I’ve no qualms at all about admitting my own pig ignorance toward this particular subject.

Hence I’ve made efforts not only to respect government requests for social distancing, but have also tried my best to keep my flat nipping clean. Sure, I’m happy and confident in my own personal hygiene (love a good shower, me). But my flatmate as noted elsewhere is a delivery driver. Who knows what his exposure risk is? Higher than mine (sitting in my flat, working from home) that’s for sure.

Crucially here, I see no reason not to follow official advice. It makes logical sense, and is coming from people I can reasonably trust to know what they’re on about. I won’t be those go crowd a shop. I won’t be those hoarding stuff out of panic. I’ve somewhat changed my diet (I’m a slag for takeout), and have started home cooking (soup maker and slow cooker FTW!). The extra veggies hardly harm matters, but the driving factor here is again cleanliness. I can properly wash my veg, prep it on what I know to be clean utensils etc. Again, all about limiting my and my flat mates exposure to nasties as much as possible. I’m not buying into ridiculous ‘miracle cures’ from the usual snake oil peddlers. I’m not buying into ‘just mix medicine A and Z’ type stuff unless it comes from official government advisory bodies.

Sadly we currently live in an age of wilful ignorance on all sides of the political spectrum. And worse, anti-intellectualism from the ‘holistic’ medicine types, who are primarily interested in selling crap for as much as possible.

The quotes above? Interesting to read how long the virus can stay active outside of a host. Sure, lab conditions etc. But even so, it’s solid food for thought and should not be discounted out of hand.

Keep clean. Eat well. Keep our distance. Sooner people get on board, the sooner the pub can reopen.

agreed, and yeah, the scenes from the weekend of people crowding beaches and fish and chip shops is obviously not good, however, I feel that there's a considerable and pertinent difference between that, and me taking my wife and daughter for a walk along some of Oxfordshires bridleways, where we may come across a handful of people, and even then, only for a couple of seconds as you pass by, obviously keeping as much distance as possible. I come into closer contact with people when I did my grocery shop.

I had my haircut this weekend, and the barber was saying he didnt know how long they were going to be open for. I might have to get the clippers out. dust off my doc martens and Ma-1 jacket while I'm at it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just seen on the news that people are still crowding onto tubes, not following the 2 metre thing. but then some people still need to work, and they've reduced the services.. so you cant win?

I just hope all these things dont result in tighter restrictions on movement for everyone else who is being sensible.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I honestly dont get what is so hard about staying home, its like......why cant you just do it?

Food doesn't deliver itself. And neither do drivers now.

There’s a difference between necessary contact, and ‘I’m gonna do whatever I want’.

Me? Sainsbury’s is out the back of my house. Literally a one minute dawdle. That means I can nip round in relative safety to get goodies in. If it’s heaving, I’ll just go home and try again later.

Others? Crowding into chip shops, take always etc, or having parties on the Common.

Quite a big difference between the two.

 Ouze wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Getting out of a bathroom without touching the door handle with your freshly clean hands is sometimes a puzzle worthy of Monkey Island.

I wash my hands, dry them with a paper towel, and then open the door with said paper towel and then toss the towel from there. There is usually a garbage can right by the door.

This is problematic in bathrooms that only have hot air hand dryers, but those are pretty rare.

Uh, maybe where you live. All bathrooms in my city are now ‘environmentally friendly’ by not using any towel at all.
Hand dryers only because paper is bad I guess.
With these sorts of initiatives, it’s impossible to not touch the door handle with your clean hands.
I personally fail to see how a couple of biodegradable towels are more polluting than a hand dryer that uses several hundred volts of electricity for several minutes. Somehow burning coal is more environmentally friendly then using paper.

 Ghool wrote:
I personally fail to see how a couple of biodegradable towels are more polluting than a hand dryer that uses several hundred volts of electricity for several minutes. Somehow burning coal is more environmentally friendly then using paper.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/25/hand-dryers-paper-towels-hygiene-dyson-airblade

In 2011, Dyson funded a peer-reviewed study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where scientists summed up all the environmental impacts of the manufacture, use and demise of paper towels, warm hand dryers and high-speed dryers. They assumed that we use two paper towels each time we wash up, that the fastest dryer runs for 12 seconds, and that the slowest for a half-minute. Hard as they were to compare, the study was confident that high-speed dryers were kindest to the environment. When every inch of the process is factored in – mining the ore to make the metal of a hand dryer, making towels out of trees, transporting these products, binning them – paper towels can generate as much as 70% more emissions than the most efficient hand dryer on the market.

Bear in mind that it was funded by Dyson and that it is compared with the most efficient hand dryer (think something like the Dyson Blade as opposed to a brick that feels as damp and pleasant as an asthmatic dog wheezing on you).
But is is worth considering that initial appearances usually mask hidden costs. Dryers do not "uses several hundred volts" and paper has many hidden costs.

Much of the hidden cost of paper is in the harvesting, transportation (esp as much comes from abroad so its going to go long distance). Plus there's the fact that for paper you've got continual production like that going on all the time; whilst for electric driers whilst the actual production per unit likely generates more; the number of units is vastly smaller.


Plus don't forget if you've got nuclear or green energy sources then running the hand drier isn't even causing that much harm when running - though of course the vast scales at which human activities operate at I'm sure there's a significant impact of their use in general. But the same can be said for ALL human impacts when you start to compare things at the national and global scales.

I also heard that hand dryers are really unhygienic anyway, but then I dont have anything to back that up.

 Overread wrote:
Much of the hidden cost of paper is in the harvesting, transportation (esp as much comes from abroad so its going to go long distance). Plus there's the fact that for paper you've got continual production like that going on all the time; whilst for electric driers whilst the actual production per unit likely generates more; the number of units is vastly smaller.

Well, the real big environmental cost of paper lies in the chemicals used to make it from pulp in the first place and then bleach it. Lots of liquid byproducts and air pollution leftovers you need to do something with, both of which apply even to recycled paper.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I also heard that hand dryers are really unhygienic anyway, but then I dont have anything to back that up.

I have seen a few articles, but they all seem to have a thumb on the scale one way or the other. One showed that hand dryers pull in unclear air from the room (bacteria, airborne fecal particles) and blasts it everywhere... but it was funded by a paper towel manufacturer's trade association. Dyson says their hand dryers are way more hygienic. The Mayo Clinic says it's a wash.

My gut says they are never cleaned and probably harbor lots of mold.

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but hand-washing hygiene in this thread seems in the ballpark at least.

Well, it seems to me, paper towels or hand dryer, neither one of them is going to hold a candle to the inner door handle that is used by people who poop and don't wash their hands. If hand dryers replace paper towels, forcing you to touch those handles, it doesn't really matter how hygienic they are.

In my experience, I'll use a hand dryer and then still grab a paper towel to open the door with, meaning I use both, so it isn't an either/or situation.

And I don't know about you guys' bathrooms, but I'm often in bathrooms where I can't get towels without touching a manual feed button, or which have no towels to begin with, or which have the trashcans on the otherside of the bathroom, out of reach of the door. Not to mention that bathroom soap dispensers are often devoid of soap, or those motion detected faucets which run for about 1 second intervals. Oh, and the urinals tend to have the floor surrounding them covered in pee and I have to be careful my shoelaces don't fall into it. And we'll not even bother going into the state of the toilets in the stalls...

I'm serious. You want to see an immediate and marked improvement of people's health, you start with the bathrooms.

 Ouze wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I also heard that hand dryers are really unhygienic anyway, but then I dont have anything to back that up.

I have seen a few articles, but they all seem to have a thumb on the scale one way or the other. One showed that hand dryers pull in unclear air from the room (bacteria, airborne fecal particles) and blasts it everywhere... but it was funded by a paper towel manufacturer's trade association. Dyson says their hand dryers are way more hygienic. The Mayo Clinic says it's a wash.

My gut says they are never cleaned and probably harbor lots of mold.

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but hand-washing hygiene in this thread seems in the ballpark at least.

It's also because simple friction (and maybe absorption sucking them to the towel together with the water?) from towels is way more effective at removing remaining germs from your hands than drying them with hot air.

Just to go back to the whole going outside thing.

From the UK government today

Dr William Bird, who advises the Government on public health, has calculated up to 7,100 could die this year due to the long-term effects of deconditioning on the body. This can occur if those who self-isolate stop being active for three months. Dr Bird said: "We must encourage people to get outdoors where possible and exercise by walking.

"And, if correct safety precautions and social distancing are observed, walking outdoors is safe even for those who are self-isolating."

Eh that sounds a bit overblown and like its taken the most extreme example - eg sitting at home, with the windows drawn, only watching the TV. There are loads of ways to exercise indoors; you can stand by the window for sunlight etc...

Also when he says "long term effects" are we starting to talk about statistics like "deconditioning shortens the lifespan by X years/weeks/perecent". Because sometimes stats like that are somewhat arbitrary, or can be somewhat abused for specific goals. If its going to potentially cost you a year if you refuse to do any home exercise etc... next to the greater potential cost of Corna virus taking you/lovedones lives now then it might well be the lesser of two evils. Especially since breathing and walking down the average urban highstreet can also come with "life shortening" results due to the pollution from vehicles etc...

 Overread wrote:
Eh that sounds a bit overblown and like its taken the most extreme example - eg sitting at home, with the windows drawn, only watching the TV. There are loads of ways to exercise indoors; you can stand by the window for sunlight etc...

Also when he says "long term effects" are we starting to talk about statistics like "deconditioning shortens the lifespan by X years/weeks/perecent". Because sometimes stats like that are somewhat arbitrary, or can be somewhat abused for specific goals. If its going to potentially cost you a year if you refuse to do any home exercise etc... next to the greater potential cost of Corna virus taking you/lovedones lives now then it might well be the lesser of two evils. Especially since breathing and walking down the average urban highstreet can also come with "life shortening" results due to the pollution from vehicles etc...

I disagree. I think staying inside permanently is terrible for you, even if you exercise or try and get sunlight from a window. walking outside isn't going to give you the virus, unless you happen to walk through someones sneeze or cough.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

I disagree. I think staying inside permanently is terrible for you, even if you exercise or try and get sunlight from a window. walking outside isn't going to give you the virus, unless you happen to walk through someones sneeze or cough.

Point of fact, you get necessary vitamin D from exposure to direct sunlight. How much you need depends on weather, latitude, and the fairness of your skin, but I've heard you generally want at least 10 minutes of sunlight. People staying indoors without getting any sun will absolutely end up with a vitamin deficiency.

It's also an important step in fighting off depression. It is believe that a lack of sunlight might be a major factor in seasonal depression, as in the winter, there is less sunlight and less direct sunlight. People who stay up all night are also a greater risk for depression and cognitive impairment. Exercise also improves mood and cognition, so a walk outside is literally one of the easiest and healthiest things you can do.

So, please, take walks outside. The last thing we want is millions of sickly, depressed people. You won't get the virus from a walk.

That's the point I've been trying to make, but you tell people to do social distancing and they think you need to batten down the hatches and hermit yourself.

I’ve decided to deal with that agency issue myself. It’s surprising how cowardly top ranks get when threatened with media and political attention. I’ve been here before.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
I’ve decided to deal with that agency issue myself. It’s surprising how cowardly top ranks get when threatened with media and political attention. I’ve been here before.

Rich people do not like to be reminded that the rest of the population is like Skaven--if we unite against a common foe for even a tiny amount of time we quickly overwhelm it by sheer weight of numbers. These days we even have the whole Pestilens shtick to boot!

Decided to try my luck at the local Tesco extra after work today. Got there just before 6pm and it was not to bad IMO. Granted there was no non flavoured milk left, toilet roll isle was still a ghost town(except for some kitchen roll) and the bread was getting low. But overall a massive improvement on last week. Apart from the milk, getting what I wanted was no problem. I was impressed that they had a hand sanitizing table set up in the entrance, a lot of staff wiping down shelves and tape on the floor for distancing guidance at the checkouts.

The Mcdonalds across the way on the other hand made me double take. The drive though had a queue out of there carpark, down the access road, around the corner and about 100 meters down the main road No wonder fresh fruit and veg was so well stocked at Tesco

https://community.ttcombat.com/2020/03/23/covid-19-update/?fbclid=IwAR2cxnJ_F9aBRr1cZ0QTvxycE4W5XTDNzrP-TxSKLe7Xt3EYl9e7Z2MP9ww

Tabletop Combat is shutting down on Wednesday and it sounds like they won't re-open until its all blown over (or at least until it has for their local region Cornwall).

It's not just their factory, but offices and studio as well so no more releases, info, photos or anything until things get back on track.

Coronavirus warhammer

I’m torn.

Is ordering take-out....

A) A Richard move, as contactless handover or no, some poor sod is out and about

B) Not a Richard move thanks to contactless handover, and the delivery dude is kept in their job

Thoughts?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m torn.

Is ordering take-out....

A) A Richard move, as contactless handover or no, some poor sod is out and about

B) Not a Richard move thanks to contactless handover, and the delivery dude is kept in their job

Thoughts?

The only winner is hindsight.

Preach that creed dude.

In theory, it can be argued it’s preferable to visiting a supermarket. Then it’s just me, the delivery person, and the kitchen staff. That’s as few as four, maybe five people.

Compared the supermarket, that’s far less personal contact (staff numbers, shared areas etc).

Except, how many others is the delivery driver off to see? Only takes a single filth wizard, no? But what if the filth wizard was in the supermarket, touching things with their gakky digits?

My trip to Prague just officially got cancelled, no april sabre tournament for me

I had figured such was the case for a couple weeks, but just got the official notice today.

Of more importance, Oregon just got put on "Stay at home" orders too, in addition to CA and WA.

I’m still dimly hopeful New York will go ahead. It’s not until the very end of June, so there’s some chance this might’ve settled down by then.