<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">What’s counterintuitive: enveloped viruses (like coronaviruses) are actually less hardy in some ways than non-enveloped ones (like ebola).<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_envelope" class="">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_envelope</a><br class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The viral envelope’s complexity also makes it harder to re-create, requiring more resources, so relatively fewer go into pathogenicity.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis" class="">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Deirdre</div><div class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Oct 11, 2020, at 13:07, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="">----- Forwarded message from Dave Palmer -----<br class=""><br class="">Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:50:02 -0700<br class="">From: Dave Palmer <br class="">To: Skeptic <skeptic@linuxmafia.com><br class="">Subject: [skeptic] This week's How Could it Get Worse? pool winners announced<br class=""><br class="">Those of you who had "covid can survive for weeks on artificial<br class="">surfaces," congratulations!<br class=""><br class="">https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54500673<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></div></body></html>