Tips to help guard against coronavirus

On yesterday's Mark Levin Show (March 3, 2020), a caller provides good advice, based on medical facts, about how to protect against the coronavirus.

The caller is a registered ER nurse and nursing school instructor. She presents several simple things that she teaches her nurses to do to protect themselves and their patients from the COVID-19 virus. Her key points are:

• The COVID-19 virus is a droplet pathogen. This means it can only travel about three feet after a sneeze or a cough before its own weight causes it to drop out of the air. If you are standing more than 3-6' away from someone, then you can not get it from them.
  • This is different from an airborne pathogen (e.g. tuberculosis or chicken pox), where the virus may remain suspended in the air for extended periods of time.
  • If infected droplets contact a surface, they can survive there. Touching an infected surface and then touching your mouth, nose or eyes can spread the infection.
• As a good rule of thumb, avoid touching any part of your body from the neck up to avoid getting infected from something you may have touched.
• Viruses are fragile. Washing tends to kill them. Washing hands and surfaces is a good way to prevent the spread of infection.
• People who wear glasses have less chance (the caller said 70% less) chance of infection, because eyes are a common point of infection and the lenses protect against nearby droplets in the air.
  • The caller says that she wears goggles when working with patients for just this purpose
• If someone coughs near you and you don't have a mask, hold your breath, walk about 15' away and then inhale. This will get you well outside the area that may contain infected droplets.

The caller finishes by describing her work in medical facilities that typically involve patients in long-term care facilities (mostly the elderly). These people have fragile health and are therefore at higher risk from viruses. She makes a point of instructing the facilities to keep patients 3-6' away from each other in order to prevent one from spreading droplet infections to another and has not heard any reports of these infections spreading among the patients.

To hear the segment, you may use the embedded player (below). Skip to time index 1:21:00 and listen for about three minutes to hear this segment: