[conspire] Virus "survival" on hard surfaces / extreme environments

[Texx]

Since they preserve virus in fridges and freezers, you should expect virus
to survive just fine in cold.
Hit em with clorine or UV radiation if you want to kill them.
Even silver salts will work.
US military has used silver compounds for decades as topical.
Somewhere I have some left over Army Surplus silver cleaning stuff.
(Silver does NO GOOD once absorbed into the body, but silver nitraate on a
table top is a nice but expensive way to clean.)

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 12:00 PM Deirdre Saoirse Moen <deirdre at deirdre.net>
wrote:

> I answered a comment in a thread on this post:
>
> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
>
> > How long does cv19 survive in a fridge? A freezer?
>
> "Survive" is an interesting question here.
>
> First of all, it's IMHO an error to consider a virus alive. I know some
> virologists consider them alive (and some do not). I personally, having
> gone through the arguments, consider them life-adjacent. They're made up of
> organic molecules but have no metabolism. So, in that sense, they're like
> frozen meat. Got that metaphor?
>
> It's likely safest to assume that, like frozen meat, they do not readily
> break down in the refrigerator or freezer.
>
> (end of that comment, on to more)
>
> Now onto my favorite part, the most abundant life form in our bodies,
> bacteriophages!
>
> https://twitter.com/kevinsky/status/1242091667013984256
>
> Oh wait, no, wrong slide. (Despite the title of that tweet, bacteriophages
> *are* viruses -- that eat bacteria.)
>
> If you look at animations of these little lunar landers, it's easy to
> think they're alive.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg
>
> But basically viruses work by finagling entry into the cells and then
> co-opting the cell's metabolism to make additional copies of themselves.
> Because viruses are so small, this will make many many many more copies.
>
> Ebola: 19k base pairs
> SARS-CoV-2: 29.9k base pairs
>
> Human genome: 3 billion base pairs, and that excludes other stuff in a
> human cell, e.g., mitochondrial DNA, RNA, etc., all of which can be
> co-opted by viruses. Note that red blood cells aren't nucleated, which
> makes them a) faster to make, and b) smaller.
>
> So essentially, there are several points at which you can try to nail a
> virus, but all of them have their problems. HIV is unique in that it uses
> reverse transcription (it's an RNA virus that reverse transcribes into a
> DNA virus), so that was where they tried to hit it.
>
> Usually, they try to aim at where the virus attaches to the cell, at the
> chemical messenger protein, however, that's there for some other reason,
> and is used by your own body for its own reasons. So it's hard stuff.
>
> --
>   Deirdre Saoirse Moen
>   deirdre at deirdre.net
>
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>


-- 

R "Texx" Woodworth
Sysadmin, E-Postmaster, IT Molewhacker
"Face down, 9 edge 1st, roadkill on the information superdata highway..."
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