Inside Science.
This is a cell culture of SARS COVID-19, the coronavirus responsible
for the COVID-19 pandemic and the
reason why I'm currently recording this
in my living room. This month we learned a lot about it for a start the virus can
survive up to three days on plastic and
stainless steel surfaces and at least
three hours in microscopic droplets in
the air. That's according to research
from the National Institute of Health. Although during that time the amount of
viable virus decreases rapidly. A new
work from Johns Hopkins suggests that
anyone unlucky enough to be infected
will begin to see symptoms after, on
average, just over five days. But the
research has also predicted around one
in 100 people could go over two
weeks before showing symptoms and that's
a problem
because people can still be infectious
during that time even though they don't
feel sick and this can lead to
undocumented spread of the disease.
In China before the travel lock down
undocumented spread like this could have
been responsible for up to 86% of
new infections, according to another new
study. The mathematicians that modeled
this also found that when the Chinese
government put in movement restrictions
it substantially reduced the spread of
undocumented infections as well as the
spread of the disease as a whole. And
that's a good thing because COVID-19 is
deadly. But actually calculating just how
deadly is quite difficult. But to work
out what proportion of people die from
the disease first you need to know
exactly how many people have had it in
the first place. And many people never
develop serious symptoms so the true
number of sufferers is underreported
Step forward researchers from The
University of Hong Kong they modeled
what the real case numbers could be
based on the number of travelers from
Wuhan
airport that tested positive after
arriving at their destination, as well as
the initial growth rate of the epidemic.
From this they estimate that as of the
end of February the chance of dying
after contracting COVID-19 was 1.4%
but within that there is a marked age
difference. On average the over-60s
are around five times more at risk than
those between 30 and 59.
Now of course doctors and medical
workers are trying to keep that
percentage down, but that brings us to
another evolving issue with COVID-19
in some places there are simply too many
patients for each one to receive
adequate care. This has had devastating
consequences in Italy and New York City
might be next. There's not enough space,
beds, health care workers with
ventilators to go around so physicians
may have to choose who gets treated and
who doesn't. And with supplies low some
hospital workers are resorting to
altering existing equipment to make more
respirators. Like taking scuba masks and
adapting tubing to use one ventilator
for more than one person and you can
read more about this story ... here on the
Inside Science webpage. But if you want
to find out which of your friends might
have caught it, a good place to look
might be Facebook. And that's because
people change the style of their
Facebook language in the days leading up
to a hospital emergency department visit.
An algorithm trained to analyze people's
Facebook vocabulary found less swearing,
less informal language, like 'lol" and 'ur'
and more words associated with family
like 'baby' and 'ma'
as well as more anxious language. And
knowing these trends, the algorithm could
more often than not predict the times
when Facebook users would go to the
hospital.
And the researchers who ran the study
hoped that this kind of data mining of
social media, could help health workers
predict potentially at-risk patients
before they even chose to come in. And
lastly, let's take a step back from
pandemics and predictions and take a
trip into the quantum realm. The
subatomic particles that live down here,
have a property called spin and we can use
this spin to our advantage.
For example to tell us about the
environment that a particle is in, like
with magnetic resonance imaging. Or to
store information as in quantum
computing. But up until now to manipulate
spin we've had to use powerful magnetic
fields, and that is until a team of
physicists trying to do just this
mistakenly blew up their own magnet. And
in doing so transformed this area of
quantum science. They published the
result of their magnetic mishap this
month they mistakenly created a powerful
electric field which could change a
particle spin itself. And this kind of an
electric control of spin had been
suggested before back in the 60s, but
never shown. This experiment at last
shows how it can be done, and this new
tool can control a particle spin much
more precisely than large hard-to-
control magnetic fields. All this could
potentially pave the way for more
sensitive detectors and even new kinds
of quantum computers. And that's it for
me this month, stay safe, goodbye.
 
powered by the American Institute of
Physics and the coalition of
underwriters
