Monday, April 20, 2020

This Is How The Cliff Dwellers Died

What if staying inside was the worst possible thing to do?
Government tests show sunlight rapidly destroys the CCP virus, according to a Department of Homeland Security science and technology report...

The half-life of the virus was 2 minutes with full solar intensity, or similar to New York City or the District of Columbia during a clear day on summer solstice.

“Sunlight reduced infectious virus to undetectable levels after just 3 minutes of exposure to the solar equivalent of midday sun on a sunny day in the middle latitudes of the U.S.,” researchers wrote.

Half solar intensity killed the virus in 3 minutes while quarter intensity, equivalent to a clear day at the end of February, inactivated it in 4 minutes.
I thought and continue to think that wearing masks outside is ludicrous. This only confirms that. Dittos for closing down the parks and trails.

Come Wednesday, we'll be seeing sunny days and 80-degree weather. That will be a good time to start my tobacco fermentation as well as get outside and imagine that I can see all the Wuhan Flu viruses die, die, die.

Title reference: The Cliff Dwellers were prehistoric* ancestors of the Pueblo Indians. I toured their ruins once, many decades ago. It was hypothesized that they died from an epidemic whose spread was aided by the fact that they lived in close proximity to one another.

They stayed indoors and that didn't work out so well for them.
* - Err, aren't all of the Indians prehistoric? I mean, they couldn't write, so that would seem to make recording histories difficult.

5 comments:

tim eisele said...

"after just 3 minutes of exposure to the solar equivalent of midday sun on a sunny day in the middle latitudes of the U.S.,”

That's OK for you, I suppose, but around here we don't get direct sunlight often enough to do much good. We only average about 66 sunny days per year, and most of those are not in the winter, spring, or early summer. "partly sunny" around here means occasional glimpses of the sun, and I don't think that helps much.

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Michigan/annual-days-of-sunshine.php

And those sunny days are mostly in July and August, which again doesn't do us much good now.

K T Cat said...

Yeah, it's not a global panacea. Still, it might help get some of us back into action. In any case, I'll think of you fondly while I'm out on the waves. ;-)

Did you also notice that humidity seems to play a part? This might be another angle to get wife kitteh to move to Mobile!

ligneus said...

Bookworm has some interesting comments on the different way the left and the right think about the lock down.
Interesting and insightful too to apply her thoughts to how the people you know have reacted. Some [like moi!] quite calm about it while thinking it's more global warming type hysteria and some going off like a chicken with its head cut off.

ligneus said...

This from Ricochet was very much my early response which got me in trouble with a very old friend who sent me an insulting reply, casting aspersions on my 'mental acuity', basically shutting down any chance of discussion. [He also didn't like the Dennis Prager Fireside Chat I sent!] Ah well, another friend gone,the times are really weird.

Foxfier said...

This calculator can help with the whole solar radiation thing:
https://fastrt.nilu.no/VitD-ez_quartMED.html

I typed in the mid-day NYC sunny summer solstice parameters, chose thick ozone, pavement and the palest option, gave me 5 minutes for daily vitamin D, so for ease of calculating we'll go with the daily vitamin D as a stand-in for destroying the virus.

Switched to Detroit and overcast but otherwise kept stuff identical, got 20 minutes.

Switched it to a cloudy 9AM, hour and a half.

Which means my kids have been walled off from the local play equipment for even more nonsense than originally figured. -.-