[conspire] Panic buying

[Nick Moffitt]

On 22Mar2020 08:02pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> The aim is _not_ to avoid even a small possibility of touching with your
> hands surfaces that might be contaminated.  The aim is to avoid
> transporting virus from surfaces to your hands to your _face_ -- which,
> short of standing right next to an infected person and breathing in
> exhaled droplets, is the only plausible way to get infected.

And of course, if you put on gloves, touch some sort of infected surface, and then (I dunno) rub your eyes or something, then the gloves have done *nothing* to protect you from contracting the virus.  You've just transported it on a latex/nitrile layer instead of your skin.

This is not a virus that attacks skin cells.  This is a virus that goes after epithelial cells.  Think of these as the equivalent of skin cells, but *inside* your body instead of *outside*.  They line your major organs, as well as various ducts and channels.  They protect said tissues from attack in a sort of ablative fashion, and have facilities to transport harmful pathogens and waste products away via mucous membrane or other mechanisms.

Incidentally, it seems that this virus triggers a heightened immune reaction that initially kills off a lot more of the epithelium than is necessary.  This has so far struck me as one of the reasons we see:

	1: a wide variety of symptoms beyond respiratory distress.  People are getting it transported to their spleens and digestive tracts as well as lungs, causing a vastly different experience of the disease than we were led to expect.
	2: People in vulnerable conditions hit so hard.  It's possibly quite easy to recover quickly from SARS-Cov-2 *itself*, but affected areas are left open to infections deep into functional organ tissues.

I wrote a long piece about treating pneumonia a few weeks ago.  It may turn out that that was simply the symptoms we saw in February, because an opportunistic pneumonia infection followed the destruction of respiratory epithelia at that time and in the locations where outbreaks were active.  We may see completely different direct causes of death from now on.