Tag Archives: Covid and singing

Art v. Covid: Round one goes to the opera singers

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The English National Opera is becalmed in a windless pandemic sea (and beset by overcooked metaphors), but it’s putting its expertise to use by teaching breathing exercises to people struggling with long Covid. On Zoom, of course. Because nothing happens in person anymore. 

Jenny Mollica, who runs the opera company’s outreach program, started hearing about long Covid–the chest pains, the exhaustion, but above all the breathlessness– and thought, “Opera is rooted in breath. That’s our expertise.” Maybe, she thought, the company had something to offer.

She got hold of Dr. Sarah Elkin, a respiratory therapist in the National Health Service, who thought, Why not? 

Yes, I know. I’m claiming to know an awful lot about what people who aren’t me thought. But I’m stealing the information straight from what they said, so we’re on relatively safe ground.

Irrelevant photo: Primroses.

Elkin and her team had some drug treatments they could try patients on, but beyond that they didn’t have a lot to offer. And Elkin used to sing jazz, so she understood first hand what vocal training could do.

They recruited a dozen participants, and one of them said in an interview that in everything he’d done since recovering from Covid, “I was struggling for air.” Even a few of the simple breathing exercises made a huge difference. “The program really does help. Physically, mentally, in terms of anxiety.”

In addition to exercises, they sing, working with lullabies from around the world. They’re easy to learn and they’re soothing, since anxiety is as much an issue for the participants as breath.

Just reading about it, I feel better. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hum a lullaby to the cat. 

 

Ultraviolet light and Covid

A reader and frequent comment-leaver, Peter Wetherill, has been telling me about UV-C light as a way to battle Covid, and I got intrigued enough to see what I could learn about it. The internet isn’t exactly awash in information on the subject, but it does have a bit, so here’s what I’ve been able to sort out. 

Ultraviolet radiation–let’s call it UV, since we’re friends–comes in three flavors: A, B, and C. They’re not the most exciting flavors nature ever created,and that’s probably why you don’t hear about them on cooking shows and why no one’s given them more exciting names. But they’re what we’ve got to work with, so will you pipe down so we can get some work done?

We’re used to A and B, even if we don’t know it. If you use sunscreen, they’re what you’re blocking. Give them enough time and opportunity and they’ll damage the skin, no matter how dark skinned you are, and they don’t do the eyes any favors either. But it takes them a good long while to do their damage. Basically, our bodies have learned to live with them.

C, though, gets blocked by the earth’s ozone layer, so we and our many germs have all evolved without protection to it. It kills germs. It’ll also damage the hell out of people. So that’s the promise and that’s the problem, all neatly wrapped around each other. Can you separate one from the other to clear our public spaces of Covid?

Answer, yes-but.

Robots have been armed with UV-C so they can disinfect the surfaces of empty planes and subway cars. That’s useful but only up to a point. Problem one, Covid doesn’t spread primarily through surface deposits. As far as they’ve been able to trace the beast, airborne transmission’s the main culprit. And problem two, the minute you let people back into the space, it’s no longer clean. Because you know what we’re like. 

UV-C can also be adapted to clean N-95 masks, but its ability to sanitize depends on (problem three) the light hitting the virus directly. If some of the viruses are covered by a fiber or by dirt, the virus wins a round. If some bit of the mask is shadowed, any virus living there wins a round. In an experiment with Staphylococcus aureus, the kill rate varied as much as 500-fold depending on the angle of the light. So it generally takes three UV systems to disinfect a hospital room, and they won’t get everything. The surfaces still need to be cleaned the old-fashioned way.

Why bother? Because they’ll kill viruses and bacteria that the old-fashioned cleaning would have missed.

All of this, remember, has to be done away from human skin and eyes, because we never evolved any protection against it. So you have to clear people out before you can do it. 

What about cleaning the air? It can do that. 

One approach is to install UV-C units in the air ducts of ventilation systems, where no one goes unless they’re in some movie, there’s tense music in the background, and everyone watching suspends what little they know about reality. Using it this way could prevent, for example, what may have happened in a quarantine hotel in New Zealand where the ventilation system (may have; it’s not certain) helpfully moved the virus from one room to another. 

Another way to use UV-C is to install the units close to the ceiling, carefully calculating what it’ll take to miss even the tallest people and being careful not to let the light scatter downwards. Fixtures of that sort cost a couple of thousand dollars each and can be used in waiting rooms, in corridors, and in other badly ventilated places where people gather or pass through and breathe. It sounds like they’ll reliably kill off any germs in their line of sight–but only in their line of sigh. So they clear the upper reaches of the room but not the lower ones.

We’re almost done here. Stay with me, because there’s another possibility, called far UV-C, which is on a different wavelength and don’t ask me about that, please. For reasons best known to itself and to people who actually understand this stuff, it hardly penetrates the outer layer of human skin and, at least in albino rats, doesn’t cause eye damage. If you’re an albino rat, this is good news. But it does still kill viruses and bacteria. So you could use it in a room full of people without worrying about how tall people are or how much of the aerosols they breasted out hang in the lower air. 

David Sliney, retired manager of the U.S. Army’s Laser and Optical Radiation Program said, “There is some evidence that it may even be more effective against airborne viruses” than other UV light. 

This is still in the range of may and some evidence, remember. And again, it only cleans what it can directly hit. The virus underneath your book? It’s safe. The virus hiding in your shadow? It’s safe until you move your shadow. But since most aerosols (and as it happens, the ones we need to worry about) will be floating around somewhere in the room’s air, it can reasonably be expected to unleash a wholesale viral slaughter.

If you’re planning to try this, you need a krypton-chlorine excimer lamp, but they have built-in problems, because they also generate light on a different wavelength–a damaging wavelength.

Back to the drawing board. 

You could filter the lamp–we’ll come back to that–or you could use a far UV-C LED lamp, which is a great idea except that they don’t exist yet, and that’s a problem. It all has to do with wavelengths and efficiency. Get the wavelength right and the efficiency falls off a cliff. Get the efficiency right and the wavelength’s wrong.

That drives us back to excimer lamps. The article I’m linking to expects them to be on the market by early 2021.

Hang on. This is early 2021. You could even argue that it’s late-early 2021. So–as my brother used to ask on car trips–are we there yet? 

Sort of. I asked Lord Google about filtered excimer lamps, and after leading me through some odd corners of the internet, including one involving fishpond sterilizers, I did find some. I think. But first I found some box-like gizmos that draw air in, sterilize it, and breathe it back out so that humans aren’t exposed to UV-C but the virus is.  

I also found a “far UV-C excimer lamp module for microbial reduction applications.” It cleans surfaces and air, it can be used in occupied and unoccupied rooms, and I’m sure the website says how much it costs somewhere but believe me, they’re not leading with that information. Let’s assume it’s expensive, but then so’s death.

In spite of the limited offerings on the internet, the article I’ve drawn most of my information from (it’s published by the IEEE Spectrum) says that “the current pandemic may yet come and go before the world has rolled out germicidal UV broadly enough to make a big impact. And so experts are already planning for the next dangerous pathogen, and when it comes, they hope to greet it with a phalanx of UV air purifiers and surface sterilizers in hospitals, airports, public transit, offices, schools, nursing homes, stores, restaurants, elevators, and elsewhere. The ubiquity of UV technology should make it much harder for an outbreak to spread, perhaps preventing a lethal contagion from ever becoming a pandemic.”

If–like me–you’re wondering what IEEE stands for, it stands for IEEE. You may have to join before they’ll tell you anything more than name, rank, and serial number. It’s a technical professional organization that’s interested in technology. And professionalism. And sounds like the scream of someone falling off a cliff: I-EEEEEEEEEEEEEeeee.

Oh, hell, I don’t know what it does, but it’s big. At least compared to other technical professional organizations. 

By way of a second source, you can find a fairly small bit about it from the FDA–the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Covid, singing, and the London Marathon: It’s the pandemic news from Britain

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The London Marathon was supposed to happen last April but it was postponed until October 4 because of the pandemic, and somewhere in between those two dates they decided to make it a virtual marathon. A handful of top runners will follow the marathon’s route and have what used to be called a race. 

What do we call it now? I’m not sure. The language tested positive the other day, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful language and it’s only in the hospital because there were some people here who wanted to be cautious. Very, very cautious. 

The test’s fake anyway. The virus is a fake. 

But with all that hospital equipment beeping, it’s hard to remember words. So never mind what we call it these days. It used to be a race. A very beautiful race.

Where were we? 

All the other runners will do their miles wherever they happen to be–Cornwall, Australia, it doesn’t matter–and log their time onto an app, which will take their word for it and give them a medal. 

Okay, the app won’t give them the medal. It has humans to do that for it.

This being Britain, a certain number of the participants will run in costume, which could be anything from a tutu to a telephone box. If you’ll click the link, you’ll see someone running in a 10 kilo a rhino costume. That’s 22 pounds, or to put it simply, a shitload of weight to go running in, especially since she has to hunch forward inside there and can’t see very well. And that’s just when she’s in training. On the day of the actual marathon, her husband will be on hand to steer her around trash barrels and gawping kids. 

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Irrelevant photo: This flower is orange. You’re welcome.

A third of Britain is living with tighter-than-the-national Covid restrictions because of a localized rise in case numbers. And what really matters in all of this is who’s to blame.  

Boris Johnson blames the public’s “fraying discipline.” It has nothing to do with the government having encouraged people over the summer to travel, eat out, drink out, get out with their wallets in hand, or with guidelines and laws so murky that Johnson got them wrong when he explained how simple they were. Or with its own advisors (and more recently an MP) breaking them. Or with a heroically useless test and trace system. 

The mayor of one affected area, Middlesbrough, said the new measures were based on “factual inaccuracies and a monstrous and frightening lack of communication, and ignorance. . . . We do not accept these measures.”

Cases have managed to double in the majority of cities and towns under the tighter restrictions. I don’t have a start date for that–the restrictions started at different times in different areas–but it ended on September 20.

The best educated guess on why they haven’t been effective is that the rules are confusing and that the communities and their leaders haven’t been involved and don’t support them. Plus that when you try to talk about what’s wrong with the test and trace system the discussion quickly falls off the edge of the English language.

Okay. The expert whose opinion I’m paraphrasing, Chris Ham, said the test and trace system was “still not working well enough.” But I’m channeling what he really thinks. You know I am.

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Serious, labor-intensive contact tracing in two Indian states shows that just a few events were responsible for a disproportionate number of Covid infections. It also suggests that, contrary to what’s generally been thought, children transmit the virus quite efficiently, thanks. Every time I read a study about kids and transmission, it contradicts that last one, so let’s not rest too much weight on that frail bridge, just acknowledge that it’s all still preliminary.

Still, this is the biggest epidemiological study of the spread so far. 

What they found is that 8% of the people they followed caused 60% of the infections. The things that seem to separate an event from a superspreader event are how close people are to someone who’s infected, how long they’re close, and how good the ventilation is. 

Contact tracers followed 78 people who’d been on a bus or train with one lone infected person, sitting within three rows of them for more than six hours, and found that 80% of them had gotten the virus. In lower-risk environments–being in the same room but three feet away–only 1.6% got the virus.

Kids between the age of five and seventeen passed the virus on to 18% of the close contacts in their own age groups. That’s not exactly parallel information–how close, how long, how well or badly ventilated, or what percent of adults passed it on to close contacts –so it doesn’t tell us whether they’re passing the bug along as efficiently as their older, wiser, creakier relatives, but what the hell, it’s information. I thought I’d throw it at you. 

The study also doesn’t answer the question of whether any biological factors separate your average infected person from your superspreader. 

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Back at the start of the pandemic, the British government set up a loan program to help businesses survive. The British Business Bank warned that it was vulnerable to being scammed by people setting up fake businesses. 

Actually, not just vulnerable to: at high risk of. The British Business Bank is state owned and was supposed to supervise the program, and it sounded the warning twice.

And surprise, surprise, exactly what they warned of has happened, although I don’t think anyone knows yet how often, or how much money the government’s on the hook for because of it. What I’ve seen so far is anecdotal–the ”someone stole my name to steal money from the government” sort of thing. But I thought you might need cheering up by now, so I wanted to mention it.

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A new study of Covid spread and singing is drawing from “faith communities” to find its participants. I’m putting that in quotes because on the one hand it manages to include every religion you can think of and several you can’t, so it’s useful, but on the other hand it sounds so prim and tippy-toed that I want to throw crockery at it.  So I’ll use the phrase and disown it at the same time. 

I just hate when people do that. Which is why I’m spending more time explaining it than I am talking about the study.

Other than its focus on religious groups, the study’s inclusive: It’ll involve people from a range of heights, sizes, sexes, ages, and ethnicities. Also with and without hairy faces in case any of that affects things. They’ll sing at different volumes, chant, or hum, using assorted face coverings, while lasers measure the aerosols they spray out. 

These days I do all my singing from inside the large plastic wheelie bin that the county supplies for green waste recycling. With the lid down. As long as the green waste guys don’t come when I’m singing and the neighbors don’t get together to push me down the hill and into the ocean, it’s perfectly safe. 

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It seems to be accepted at this point that Covid can catch a ride on the aerosols that we breathe out when we do all those noisy, communicative things that human evolution has given us, but it’s not clear to what extent aerosol-borne germs actually spread the disease. 

What is known is that aerosols travel more than six feet–the magic distance that’s supposed to keep us all safe from other people’s germs. The six-foot recommendation was based on the larger particles–droplets–which fall to the ground relatively close to the breathing, singing, humming source. But aerosols can hang in the air for hours. They hold dances up there. They run marathons in rhinoceros costumes. 

Okay, we don’t know what they do up there, or how dangerous it is to us. All we know for sure is that ventilation is a good thing. So are air purifying systems.

Mind you, I don’t know what qualifies as an air purifying system and I’m not in a hurry to take any non-expert’s word on it. I do know that open windows work. I also know that in a Minnesota January open windows aren’t as simple a solution as they are in June.

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An article in Journal of General Internal Medicine surveyed 28 experts in vaccinology (yes, there is such a thing) and on an average they thought a vaccine would be available to the general public (this would be in the US or Canada) at the earliest in June 2021 but more probably in September or October.

For people at the greatest risk, the soonest would be February but more probably March or April.

But as the great Yogi Berra may or may not have said, “It’s hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.”

Berra also may or may not have said, “I never said half the things I said,” which is why I’m being cautious about attributing that quote to him. Someone will, inevitably, let me know that someone else said it. And they’ll probably be right.

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Having Neanderthal genes, as 16% of Europeans, 50% of south Asians, and 0% of Africans do, can make a person three times more likely to need ventilation if they’re infected with Covid.

But Professor Mark Maslin added a however to that: “Lots of different populations are being severely affected, many of which do not have any Neanderthal genes. We must avoid simplifying the causes and impact of Covid-19. . . . Covid-19 is a complex disease, the severity of which has been linked to age, gender, ethnicity, obesity, health, virus load among other things.”

I only mentioned it because it’s so damn weird.

Still disinfecting the groceries? News on how Covid’s spread, plus other sciency stuff

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A new study reports that most Covid infections are spread by aerosols–in other words, by the awkward fact that we breathe, a process that leads us to trade both air and germs with those we love, not to mention those we don’t. Earlier studies measured how long the virus could survive on objects and speculated about that as a route of transmission, but this one didn’t find much evidence that transmission happens that way in the real world. 

So the good news is that you can stop boiling the toilet paper when you bring it home from the store. Also that those masks really do make a difference–possibly to you, but definitely to the people around you. And that keeping your distance from other people is good protection.

But anytime you say, “The good news is,” you have to follow it with parallel bad news. So the bad news, if we’re to believe the rumor I heard yesterday, is that people are expecting Britain to go into another lockdown and already they’re panic buying. Because the country’s semi-officially in the second wave of the pandemic. Cases are doubling every week. The test and trace system that was supposed to let us control the spread is demented, broken, and–forgive the technical language here–completely fucked. The people who purport to govern the country say they want to avoid a lockdown, and the more they say it, the more inevitable it looks. So stock up on toilet paper. Also flour. And if you’re British, baked beans. 

Everything else you can do without. Unless you have pet food. Stock up on pet food.

Irrelevant photo: Erigeron. Really. That’s what they’re called.

But forget rumor. Let’s go back to science and the study I was talking about. It also reports that Covid transmission is highest about a day before the symptoms show up, making complete nonsense of the idea that we should limit tests to people with symptoms. 

No transmission has been documented after a patient’s had symptoms for a week. That doesn’t completely rule it out, but it does kind of point us in that direction.

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A new study of Covid and singing–more bad news; sorry, everyone–pretty much contradicts the last study of aerosols and singing that I told you about. That earlier one measured the aerosols and droplets sprayed into the air by individual singers and by individual speakers and reported that quiet singing doesn’t spread aerosols much more than quiet speaking does. Turn up the volume on either and you up the Covid spread.

But.

This latest study looked at a superspreader event involving one choir rehearsal that caused over fifty cases of Covid and two deaths. It broke down people’s interactions at the rehearsal, concluding that the combination of poor ventilation, many people, a long rehearsal, and body heat led to a buildup of aerosols that circulated with the air in the room.

No one was wearing masks. This was well before masks were recommended, and although I haven’t tried singing through one I have trouble imagining that it’d work well. 

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A third study reports that most homemade masks work just fine, even when we sneeze. Emphasis on most. I still see the occasional online photo of or pattern for crocheted masks. What are people thinking? They might as well take chalk and draw a mask on their faces.

Or magic marker if they want a longer-lasting useless gesture.

Sorry about the lack of a link here. I cleverly linked it to this post. By the time I figured that out, I’d lost the actual article.

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One more study and then I’ll shut about about science and we can go back to the glorious and multicolored ignorance that marks public life these days. This one comes from Dublin, was presented at a conference involving many initials, and shows that about half the people who get ill with Covid have persistent fatigue ten weeks after they recover, even if they had mild cases. The fatigue hits women more often than men.

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A man coming back from traveling abroad was told to isolate himself for two weeks. Instead he went on a pub crawl with some friends. They hit a number of pubs, then two days later the returned traveler tested positive. 

The area went from 12 cases per 100,000 to 212 cases per 100,000 in less than three weeks. 

See? I told you we’d stop talking about science.

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Spain is developing a test that will allow people to test themselves and get a result in thirty minutes. It works like the gizmos that diabetics use to measure their blood sugar, meaning a person could use it and reuse it, and it gives no false positives.

Does it give any false negatives? Good question, and wasn’t I clever to ask it? I’m not sure. I could only find one reasonably up-to-date article on the thing and it didn’t say. 

The test is called the Convat and it’s “very advanced” and “almost at a pre-commercial level,” whatever that means. It sounds good unless you slow down, at which point you notice how little you understand it. 

It may be available to the public in December or January. Emphasis on may.

Now the fine print: They’re talking about the public in Spain. The project manager, Laura Lechuga, talked about the importance of having Spanish technology, since what’s available in one country may not become available in another. In other words, this is Spain trying to make sure they can handle their problems, not ours.

Sorry to tease you with that. We really need to all be in this together, but at the moment we don’t seem to be.