Covid: Ventilation and Beyond
by David Archibald
6 August 2024
We are still finding out things about human physiology and psychology. For example, in the covid lockdown the number of premature births at our hospitals dropped remarkably. In hindsight, it seems that having the husband around the house all the time reduced prenatal stress. The corollary is that a preterm birth can be caused by the perceived loss of the primary provider — which may have an evolutionary basis.
The lockdowns were also a big experiment in not breathing other peoples’ exhalations. We are revisiting this because of a recent suggestion by Nick Coatsworth, one of the medical talking heads of period, that any effort to improve air quality would be wasted:
We can test Dr Coatsworth’s claim by examining the statistics compiled by the NSW Department of Health. It turns out that breaking the chain of transmission stopped a number of diseases in their tracks:
The incidence of mumps dropped away during the lockdown, and then took a year to get back to its previous pattern of activity.
Malaria dropped away too. Whether this was due to fewer freshly infected travellers arriving from overseas or due to fewer NSW people wading through their favourite malarial swamps, we won’t ponder that here.
Reported influenza was in a strong uptrend up to the covid era, disappeared in the lockdown and then came back with a vengeance. The big spikes of the last two years could be due to immune systems weakened by covid. Influenza has a 0.3% fatality rate so the 50,125 reported cases in July 2024 would be good for 155 deaths. The influenza cases for the first half of the year would be good for 384 deaths, which is more than the 349 road deaths in 2023. Lack of clean air has its price. Let’s go on to something more cheerful — typhoid:
Typhoid responded to the lockdown and went back to its normal behaviour straight away afterwards.
Whereas whooping cough had nearly two years of near-zero incidence after the lockdown finished and then bolted to a new high. Whooping cough (pertussis) is caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis. The case fatality rate in babies is 0.5% so it is a big deal.
Influenza B responded to the lockdown and is now back to peaking every second year.
Cryptosporidium didn’t respond to the lockdown and then shot to a new high of 731 cases in March, 2024. Cryptosporidium brings with it a baleful legacy of a higher incidence of bile duct cancer later in life, which itself is a death sentence. This protozoal parasite is also significant as an Aids-defining illness as shown in the following graphic showing which diseases appear as an individual’s CD4 level falls below 500:
Which begs the question — how much of that big spike was due to swimming pools and poor hygiene and how much, if any, was due to immune systems weakened by covid? It would be worth finding out.
Dengue fever responded to the lockdown and bounded back to its normal incidence straight afterwards.
Hepatitis A also responded to the lockdown.
The results of the lockdown air quality experiment are in and they show that improved air quality is worth having. It will take much more than that to get covid under control though. Extreme ultraviolet light at 222 nm would help, but it won’t operate fast enough in a lift, for example. It will take a combination of N95 masks and pharmaceuticals — specifically molecules that will stop viral replication in infected cells. With respect to the covid vaccines, Dr Coatsworth was promoting them when they were fashionable but now tells us that he hasn’t had a covid vaccine for two years. Actually, the requisite doses of antivirals and immune stimulants to get covid under control is going to make us a much healthier society.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia.