Are you wondering how you can take action that directly makes a difference during the crisis? Join us at Blivande producing visors and medical gowns for healthcare professionals fighting covid-19 on the front line. @hampus, @Linnea and the rest of the team have worked hard to set up a production line, and we are churning out equipment. @kimgajraj made this video to bring in more material donations so that we can keep working.
We have been told the current rate of use for these medical gowns is around 20,000 per day, and our doctors, nurses are carers are in real need of more.
Blivande has now produced at least 700 of these smocks for local clinics and care facilities. It really makes a huge difference. One of the clinics we delivered to said that we had saved them for the coming two weeks.
Maybe this method can be exported to the OCI Lab @nadia, @zmorda, @HadeerGhareeb? We’d be happy to instruct people over video link on how to get production going. Very little special equipment needed.
I shared this link with Project Nitrous they make 3D PRINTED PPE in Egypt, so far they make only masks so it will be great if they can make the gowns too
Excellent. We will be happy to help them set up gown production too. We will have a handbook and instruction video ready very soon, both in English. Would be great to translate that material to French and Arabic. Maybe that’s something we can get people in the OCI Lab to do?
I read just now this story about Sweden’s plans to open up more because they seem to believe that they are reaching “herd immunity” while also admitting that, as the WHO confirms, it is not known if having had the virus actually gives one immunity.
Sort of. When the WHO says that, they are saying it the most careful of scientific language. In fact, most experts on coronaviruses believe that it’s highly likely (I’ve even heard it phrased as “almost certain”) that there will be enough immunity so that subsequent infections will be mild. Two of the worlds most experienced scientists on coronaviruses, Stanley Perlman and Ralph Baric, were interviewed on the This Week in Virology podcast recently to explain what we know about this family of viruses and this one in particular. As both of them explained, immunity is not binary. There are four coronaviruses endemic to the human population, and we have some immunity to all of them in that when we catch them they just give us a common cold.
If herd immunity is in fact not possible, we are in much deeper trouble. It is completely impossible to contain and eradicate this virus at this point. Islands like New Zealand can do it temporarily at great cost, but as soon as they open their borders, they will have it again. I personally think it’s futile. If herd immunity isn’t possible, then no vaccine is going to help us either. In that case, we can really only hope for one of two things; either the virus mutates to a less deadly variant that outcompetes the deadly strains, or we come up with better medications and treatment protocols to help us live with it.
This opening up process might be - will be - one of the great social experiments of all time. In 1918-19 in the USA, many cities opened back up too fast and the second wave was much bigger and more deadly than the first. I suspect that the people of Sweden are more disciplined or at least socially responsible than what we see over on my side of the Atlantic. America is not even capable of broad social discipline at this point and the results look like they are going to get very deadly.
It’s possible to turn that around and say that nationwide lockdowns was an even bigger social experiment. Remember that 1918-1919 lockdowns were on a per-city basis. Taking measures like this across entire countries is truly a staggering experiment. Once you clamp down hard, it’s hard to climb back up of a lock-down and not have cases spike.
The really massive problem in the US is that something that should be up to science has become a political battle on which it is acceptable to have partisan opinions. I’m a lot more scared of that than I am of lockdown ending. How this has been handled in the US, but both press, politicians and the public, has really accentuated how badly equipped the US is to deal with any kind of crisis. It’s like we’ve talked about before – it’s not functioning as a nation-state anymore.
