Coronavirus, Covid 19 Discussion and How It Has Affected Your Daily Life Chat Thread

[IamRainey]

My XH lost his to chemo for leukemia, I think it took around a year before he could really taste again, but eventually it did come back. May need to be patient.

I know someone (an aspiring chef, as it turns out ) who lost her sense of smell when her bicycle was hit by a car. Hers, too, returned VERY slowly and by small increments. BUT, the good news is that it WILL come back. The important thing is to continue eating and maintaining your body strength even if food is very uninteresting for a while.

 

[aart]

Ok! Progress on Yule presents! I have 8 of these bars of soap. 8) A very BIG improvement over the LAST crystal soaps I made. I have enough soap base left to make about 10 more. Lavender scented with a lil tea tree for antimicrobial properties and to enhance the lavender.

So the purple 'crystals' are soap too?
I hope so, my first thought was 'oh that's gotta hurt!'

 

[aart]

People breaching the beach ban in France were fined 150eu....ticketed by police.

 

[IamRainey]

They're serious about it in France. OTOH, they pay people who are not able to work because of their lockdown 85% of their salaries. AND they issue exemptions for any reasonable need if the petitioner requests one in advance. Legitimate exemptions have included walking dogs. ...at least at the time my friend was still living there during the first lockdown.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

So the purple 'crystals' are soap too?
I hope so, my first thought was 'oh that's gotta hurt!'

Correct. the whole block is soap all the way through. They're a bit rubbery actually, but they sure don't LOOK it, huh?

 

[BigBlueHen53]

Correct. the whole block is soap all the way through. They're a bit rubbery actually, but they sure don't LOOK it, huh?

Very interesting! Have been thinking about making soap. Now I'm intimidated.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Very interesting! Have been thinking about making soap. Now I'm intimidated.

I did this block in 3 hours and it would be easier if I was making more, so it's not all bad. These types of soaps have a glycerin base, so that's really hard to make by hand so we buy it from a local bulk supplier for oils, powders, soaps and candles (same place we get candle stuff from) along with the scents. Glycerin soaps you just heat, color, and pour to shape. Other types of soaps are more challenging but my mom used to make lard and lye soap when I was a kid and it cleaned dang near anything it so much as looked at. Smelled funny, though. Someday, when I have pigs, goats, cows and bees, I will make my own soap bases. Until then, I will stick to the meltable soaps and soap carving.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

It's a serious glow-up from LAST years gemstone soap model!

 

[electrycmonk]

https://www.latimes.com/world-natio...y-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19?

Fascinating and part of why this stuff keeps spreading TBH.

There's an adblock paywall so I'll highlight some key info.

"The results of the study, for which Lee and other epidemiologists enlisted the help of an engineer who specializes in aerodynamics, were published last week in the Journal of Korean Medical Science. The conclusions raised concerns that the widely accepted standard of six feet of social distance may not be far enough to keep people safe.

The study — adding to a growing body of evidence on airborne transmission of the virus — highlighted how South Korea’s meticulous and often invasive contact tracing regime has enabled researchers to closely track how the virus moves through populations....

“There’s a real misconception about this in the public,” said Seung, who was not involved in the South Korea study. “They’re thinking, if I’m not a close contact, I will magically be protected.”....

The South Korean study began with a mystery. When a high school senior "A" in Jeonju tested positive for the virus on June 17, epidemiologists were stumped because the city hadn’t had a coronavirus case in two months....

Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the transmission of viruses in the air, said the five-minute window in which the student, identified in the study as “A,” was infected was notable because the droplet was large enough to carry a viral load, but small enough to travel 20 feet through the air.

“‘A’ had to get a large dose in just five minutes, provided by larger aerosols probably about 50 microns,” she said. “Large aerosols or small droplets overlapping in that gray area can transmit disease further than one or two meters [3.3 to 6.6 feet] if you have strong airflow.”....

Lee and his team re-created the conditions in the restaurant — researchers sat at tables as stand-ins — and measured the airflow. The high school student and a third diner who was infected had been sitting directly along the flow of air from an air conditioner; other diners who had their back to the airflow were not infected. Through genome sequencing, the team confirmed the three patients’ virus genomic types matched.

“Incredibly, despite sitting a far distance away, the airflow came down the wall and created a valley of wind. People who were along that line were infected,” Lee said. “We concluded this was a droplet transmission, and beyond” 6.6 feet.

The pattern of infection in the restaurant showed it was transmission through small droplets or larger aerosols either landing on the face or being breathed in, said Marr, the Virginia Tech professor who was not involved in the study. The measured air velocity in the restaurant, which did not have windows or a ventilation system, was about 3.3 feet per second, the equivalent of a blowing fan.

“Eating indoors at a restaurant is one of the riskiest things you can do in a pandemic,” she said. “Even if there is distancing, as this shows and other studies show, the distancing is not enough.”"

This is the particulates stuff my brain stuck to early on and kept ahold of from my physics background.....

 

[Pandemic pandemonia]

Okay... So another short story from my UNT days in the dorms.....
So ....cue the squiggly horizontal lines on the screen from old school TV as we fade back in time....

Meanwhile, full-time studies at UNT, living in 'Bruce Hall' and jokingly known as "the old man" of the hall, taking the 2nd semester of the two part Theatre history class. Along with teaching Astronomy labs, and dealing with the *worry* for the upcoming Y2K *F*E*A*R*... Having had some hard stuff happen 2 summers before when I lost 2 grandfather's... 2 weeks apart.

Often the lobby was filled with a couple solid "circles of friends" just like the cliché family room..... Talking about many deep topics at litterally any hour of the day, night, or wee hours of the morning!

In context, history just doesn't have a solid flavor of humour to its textbooks. The only ones that barely starts to broach this topic is the Theatre history textbooks that document plays. RTVF have a parallel with their textbooks with documenting movies and TV shows as well as radio shows....

I was walking in the entrance to the dorm after the nights labs at the observatory, it was about 1AM, the usual suspects where having a talk/debate/heavily sarcastic laugh about history and the idea of what would be funny the morning of January first....

Then I sat down and kinda got a "brief, if laughable clift notes".... Banter continues for a good hour plus, it's at least 2:30AM....
Folks are starting to head to bed... As do I....

I'm waking up the next morning, getting around... Post my W.O.P.O.T.D. on livejournal then grab my Unicycle, backpack and head to the cafeteria for breakfast before theatre history class....

Sitting at the big round table, thinking about the two extremes: comedy and tragedy...
I start to think about timing....
Classes occur....
Time to return for lunch.....
Wander in and join several and I'm still thinking about this differential....
I bring up the episode of the "Johnny Carson's Tonight show" that had actually talked in the monologue about when was the safe time to start making jokes about the space shuttle blowing up after it's launch.... And how the NASA acronym was now morbidly funny: Need another Seven Astronauts

That's when I came across with and said....
The idea (given the physics classes had also added to my thoughts as to this topic)
.... It's an equation that is always in flux.
The one element that seperates these two "ideas" ... Comedy and tragedy stories are seperated by *time*.... Morbid humour. Black humour. Sarcastic humour. Death humour. All this stuff is eventually something someone will laugh at, it just depends on how much *time* it takes to shift to a topic that can be laughed about.

So, around dinner time I started to share this .....

Then a few years later... 2003, and when this shuttle accident over Texas happened a few of us wondered when the 1st jokes will start to show up from this event..... That's when I was able to bring up this equation again and it definitely had a lot more traction and no one saw any disagreement on this idea.....



(Movie quote reply, "Laugh it up fuzzball.")

(Sideways glance & wagging index finger)
"You know, I've a track record of insomnia posts here silly....."

On the Kansas City MO radio station the DJ's were laughing about how they kept working during this and how they were putting their lives at risk at times but just kept working etc. and their different health problems but they just kept working and still do. Anyway they were trying to make jokes about it all and lighten the mood some.