The State of the Virus
The summer/fall covid-19 surge is finally receding — while it raged, the amount of virus circulating rivaled the typical winter peaks except for the deadly Omicron wave of the winter of 2021-2022. See the graph below from J.P. Weiland.
A Personal Case Study
The disease entered my own family recently, starting with one of the granddaughters, and showed up positive on an antigen test the morning that some of us were literally on the way to the airport for a trip. (It’s always good to test before an airplane trip — much better to find out while you are still at home instead of at a far-away or foreign location!) Although my wife tested negative that morning, the trip was canceled, and we started isolation measures at home — both of us masking and with windows open, with the weather being mild.
She was starting to feel some scratchiness in her throat, and in the evening, she tested positive with a faint red line on the test.
Our blog post of Feb. 9, 2023 gave detailed instructions for the best method —setting up the sick person in a single bedroom, or a single bedroom and bathroom. We did this for the acute phase of the infection, where my wife was in bed most of the time, and with a fever. This lasted about 36 hours.
As she started to gradually recover, we wanted to have her be able to spend time in other rooms of the house — her home office, and shared time in the kitchen. To accomplish this, we switched directions on our large amount of fresh air ventilation. We set up two dual window fans in a seldom-used room of the house to draw in fresh air 24/7, and then cracked open the windows a few inches in the other rooms of the house, effectively giving every room an exhaust fan, removing virus-laden air from the house right away in every room.
I monitored the effectiveness of this scheme with CO2 meters, which typically kept the CO2 less than 500 ppm — achieving a very high level of airflow.
We knew her contagious stage (positive antigen test) was going to last a week or more, and it did — the first negative test eventually came on Day 11.
In the meantime, she had her bedroom, bathroom and office, where she didn’t need to wear a mask. When we were both in the same room, we both were masked. We had our meals “together” in separate rooms, and connected via computer or phone. As she continued to recover, we even did the dishes together, both in our excellent masks.
A Note on Masks
I mostly wore the BROAD Airflow mask that we have discussed many times — see the blog post of Sept. 12, 2024 for example. This is such an excellent mask for someone who wants to avoid infection, in that it provides HEPA-filtered air at a positive pressure so any leakage is outward, the safe direction. (I used the enhanced version that we make, where a slight internal air leakage is fixed, improving the efficiency.)
But this mask is NOT what to use for an infected person. Here the mission is to carefully filter the exhaled air, with no leakage. Incoming air does not have to be filtered at all. That is, the mask need for an infected person is the opposite as for someone exposed to industrial dust or wildfire smoke in the air. Both mask types have a one-way airflow valve, but the airflow direction is opposite. Masks with one-way air valves can be purchased with the valve in the exhale direction, but not in the inhale direction.
So I made some new masks by removing and reversing the airflow valve, or adding a valve to a regular N95 mask. This change makes the mask much more pleasant to wear, with lots of cool incoming fresh air that does not have to get restricted by filter material. The breathing-out air is still filtered effectively by the well-fitting N95 mask.
A Final Note
It is an odd experience — taking careful measures the best you know how to do, and finding out after a three-day delay if what you were doing was successful! (Three days is the typical incubation period for the current variants, from exposure until the virus builds up enough to show symptoms or a positive antigen test.)
But research continues to accumulate showing that each additional infection of covid-19 comes at substantial extra risk, particularly for older people, and our recent experience shows that you need not roll the dice — you can take excellent care of the sick person or people while avoiding spreading the disease to others. See links below:
What Repeat COVID Infections Do To Your Body, According to Science, SELF
COVID-19 Reinfection Ups Risk of Long COVID, New Data Show, University of Minnesota
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