RE: Supporter video | Virus update + videos | Microsoft and the Queen of Spirit Cooking

I wanted to comment on a couple things that were in the video. First, that headline where they state that the virus can spread up to 13 feet from a person, more than twice the 6 ft gov't. social distancing rule, it may be a bit misleading to think of it in those simple terms. Similar to the inverse square law with light and other types of radiation, the further away you get from the source of the infectious aerosols, the chances of transmission are going to decrease at an exponential of that distance. I would assume that it's possible for the virus to spread even further than 13 feet, but the chances become so slim that it's not worth thinking about. Therefore following the 6 ft. rule is going to reduce transmission exponentially, although it will not reduce the chances of transmission to zero.

Second, the research there about the virus requiring extreme heat to be killed should be viewed with great skepticism. A virus with a bilipid membrane envelope like SARS-CoV-2, just like the cells in our body (which is where it gets that membrane from), is not going to cope well with extreme temperatures for very long. Simply drying the virus out should "kill" it (strangely, viruses aren't really alive until they infect a cell, they require the machinery of a host function at all). If you're interested in researching further, I would look at their methods and see what it is that they used to determine the presence of the virus. Just because you can detect something like the surface protein or viral RNA doesn't mean you've got a viable virus that can cause an infection. Proteins and RNA are a lot more robust than the viral envelope. It all needs to be in assembled form with its spike proteins sticking out of the envelope in order to attack a host cell. What they would need to show is this: put the sample in extreme heat, then expose a human cell culture to it and see if those cells can be infected in vitro. If they show that it can infect those cells, we've got viable virus. Otherwise, nothing that they demonstrate is proof of viral survival in that extreme environment. My guess is that this is not the method they used.

Now, if the above method was demonstrated with viable virus still able to infect cells, we're not dealing with a coronavirus. It would be one of the non-enveloped mammalian viruses causing the infection in that case.

Oh, another thing I just thought of, is that if they heated a solution with the virus in it, it's possible that the virus could endure pretty extreme temperatures. The key there for viral survival would be to keep the virus hydrated in a solution. If we're talking about food, standard cooking methods should work no problem. If we're talking about a delivered package, giving it time to dry out completely will work. Wiping it down should also work.