[conspire] (forw) [skeptic] This week's How Could it Get Worse? pool winners announced

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

What’s counterintuitive: enveloped viruses (like coronaviruses) are actually less hardy in some ways than non-enveloped ones (like ebola).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_envelope

Why? Because the lipid bi-layer is, like all lipid bi-layers (e.g., those of skin cells, bacteria, misc. germs), susceptible to breakdown with things like soap, where it’s harder to break apart the protein chain of a non-enveloped virus. A lot of the way some enveloped viruses work is by markers on the outside of the envelope, but if that’s gone, whoops.

The viral envelope’s complexity also makes it harder to re-create, requiring more resources, so relatively fewer go into pathogenicity.

It does protect the protein innards against the immune system in the short term, though, and thus enveloped viruses are more likely to cause persistent infections. An example of a particularly horrific one is FIP (a complication of FCoV), which Sherpa died to earlier this year, Another is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a similar kind of inflammatory disease that comes from an RNA virus, unfortunately this time in humans, from measles, and involving the brain, and almost always fatal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis>

Deirdre

> On Oct 11, 2020, at 13:07, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Dave Palmer -----
> 
> Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:50:02 -0700
> From: Dave Palmer 
> To: Skeptic <skeptic at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: [skeptic] This week's How Could it Get Worse? pool winners announced
> 
> Those of you who had "covid can survive for weeks on artificial
> surfaces," congratulations!
> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54500673

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