5 Ways to Keep Your Family Safe From Covid-19 (Pedcast)

Seems like the natural world is infecting human kind with some nasty pathogens these days. Just think about it, in just the past 20 years we have had to deal with SARS-CoV-1 (likely coming from bats), and MERS (a camel cold virus), H1N1 (from pigs and birds), and Zika jumping from rhesus monkeys to humans via mosquitoes. And this is just a partial list. In a world where pathogens are coming at us faster than a major league fastball, it's time for us to learn more about epidemics and more importantly, how to defend ourselves.  That's exactly what we are going to do in today's pedcast. Above Image by Pixabay Musical Introduction How do Germs Move Around? As we have just witnessed, infectious diseases can travel very fast and won't stop until they have run out of susceptible hosts. Some germs require a "vector" like a mosquito but others have the ability to jump from human to human without an intermediary insect or animal, the way corona viruses move.  This type of germ is more likely to cause pandemics like we are experiencing today. Any highly transmissible germ will continue to circulate and make children and people sick until enough the microbe literally runs out of children or people to infect.  The contagiousness of a germ is measured by a number called the R-naught. The R-naught represents the average number of people each sick person will infect. The higher this number is, the more contagious the germ.  Once a large number of people have become immune to infection, the population has reached a critical percentage of immunity known as  "herd immunity". At this point, the epidemic stops. With SARS-CoV-2, it has an R-naught of between 2-3 and experts guess that person to person transmission will stop when about 60-70% of our population is immune. For measles, a much for infectious germ with an R-naught of 12-18 , epidemic spread will continue until 95% of the population is immune.  At the time of this writing, a sample of North Carolina residents finds that only 10% of our residents are immune to SA