In an ideal world, governments and organisations would have taken on the responsibility of protecting us from a SARS virus that is handled in labs at biosafety level 3, along with tuberculosis, West Nile virus and yellow fever. I mean, isn’t it the most basic function of any government, to keep its people physically safe? I thought that was what all our taxes were for. State-level public health and safety interventions are much more effective than each citizen going it alone. We accepted it for our vaccinations at school, for drinking and driving, for smoking in restaurants, food quality standards, for asbestos, lead paint, speed limits in cars, and it made us healthier and safer. In the US and UK there is a better vaccination plan in place to combat flu right now and we know that Covid is much more dangerous than flu. This decision to abandon trying to tackle serious public health threats is a new and frightening development for us. We’re on our own. So, what can we do?
Number 1 objective: Don’t catch Covid. The best way to avoid Long Covid and long-term health problems is to not catch Covid in the first place. The fact that there is currently no cure and no treatment for Long Covid is especially motivating.
Number 2 objective: Don’t catch Covid AGAIN. It’s very difficult to avoid catching Covid and a majority of people have probably had at least one infection already. At this point, your goal is to not catch it again because we know that the more times you are infected the more chance of long-term and serious health problems.
How do I avoid catching Covid? The bottom line is you have change your behaviour. I’m sorry that it’s an unattractive and boring solution that will probably impact your social life for sure, but it’s addressing the reality we live in, rather that how we would like it to be. If you’re not comfortable making big changes and are willing to take on more risk, even smaller changes can make a difference.
Avoiding Covid is protecting yourself with different layers. Until we get a sterilising vaccine like we have for measles, we need to use several different mitigations to give us the best chance of avoiding infection. This graphic from the NYT from 2020 illustrates the concept of layering Covid mitigations to protect yourself. Although we don’t have any government messaging or support and the focus on hand hygiene is laughably out-of-date the concept still holds up.
How to avoid infection:
Firstly, know your enemy. Read this to understand practical things about Covid: 42 useful things to know about Covid
Wear a good mask in all indoor/inside spaces that are not your home. Don’t take your mask off to eat, drink or for photos. That defeats the entire point. Surgical blue masks and cloth masks are almost useless. The mask needs to fit tightly enough to your face there are no air gaps at the sides so all the air you are breathing is filtered through the mask. You want a N95 or FFP3 respirator. Aura masks by 3M are really good and available everywhere. James uses Flomask. I use Draeger because I have a big nose. The best protection is elastomeric and the plus side is you can decorate them. You can reuse disposable masks several times by putting them in brown bags and leaving them a few days. Don’t buy masks from Amazon if you can help it because it’s full of fakes. There are good masks you can wear inside MRI machines (I’ve done it), and masks you can stick on for the hairdresser (I’ve done that too). You can retrofit your masks to allow you to drink without removing them (works just fine). Being outside is safer but not completely safe, especially if it’s crowded or there is no wind. A garden party rubbing shoulders with 30 people is still pretty high risk. Also, your home is not magic; if you invite people in then you are at the mercy of whatever they have brought so protect yourself accordingly.
Get vaccinated. And it needs to be up-to-date within the last year. All the studies say that vaccination is effective in reducing the impact of the initial infection and also reduces your chances of Long Covid. Although a very small minority of people react badly to any medicine or vaccine, the benefits WAY outweigh the downsides. A guy in Germany even got 217 Covid vaccines and suffered no side effects! Absolutely vaccinate your children and make sure they’ve got all the other ones while you’re at it. The best vaccine to get is Novavax 23/24; the results are better than anything else out there right now. Also it’s not mRNA (if that matters to you), and there are fewer side effects. You can get it in CVS and pharmacies in the US, and in the UK from April at Pharmadoctor. If you got a vaccine more than three months ago and it wasn’t Novavax 23/24 go and get this one. If you do nothing else, at least get and stay vaccinated so that you reduce your odds of losing on a spin of Long Covid roulette.
Don’t go to places that are crowded. It’s possible if you wore a really good mask to go see Taylor Swift in concert and were extremely lucky that you could escape catching Covid, but I wouldn’t risk it. Just recently Adele and Justin Timberlake have cancelled concerts “because of illness” and performers have been cancelling at crazy new levels since 2020 so they’re clearly not safe at their own concerts. Places with lots of singing, shouting and people close together are the most dangerous.
Plan the things you do to be safer. If you really want to see that movie, wait until it’s been in the cinema a few weeks, pick a quiet showing and wear a mask. Book your appointments for first thing in the morning so you’re not breathing the air of the person before you. If you have to eat at restaurants outside is better than inside. Meet friends outside.
Ventilate! This is so effective and one of the few free-ish things you can do. Open doors and windows, get air moving as much as you can. It’s admittedly not as great in cold country but still better than Long Covid.
Clean the air with HEPA filters and FAR-UVC technology. Buy or make air purifiers. We have Blueair purifiers for our house and personal mini Smart air for carrying with us places. You can make extremely cheap air purifiers with HEPA filters and a PC fan, there are tutorials all over the internet. You have to make sure the purifier can turn over the air volume of your room a certain amount of times an hour to be safe. (CDC recommends five). I’m not as up on Far-UVC tech but these are well regarded and they used them in Ninewells Hospital. This will be the thing that saves us if the government ever bothers its arse to do something and it’s crazy we haven’t done this already. We could have been reducing the flu, common cold, people’s asthma and allergies, pollution effects and Covid this whole time. It would be of enormous economic benefit as people would be less sick. Other countries are already way ahead of the US and UK in this. Taxis in Japan. HEPA filters in Italian trains. Billionaires at DAVOS invest in clean air technology and test all attendees, they’re not stupid. We should be demanding that when our kids go to school the air is as clean as the system they installed in the Houses of Parliament
Use preventative medicines. Nasal sprays like VirX and Viraleze have been proven to reduce the amount of virus present in your sinuses and so using them before and after encounters with people could kill off an infection before it starts. Nasal sprays with carrageenan like Norizite and Boots Dual Defence do the same. Gargling with antiviral mouthwashes kills off viruses in the same way. We use Curaprox PerioPlus+. These are also super useful to use during infections to try and reduce the amount of virus. New studies have talked about how there might be a connection between low iron and Long Covid, so take vitamins. If you live in the UK, you’re probably deficient in vitamin D like I was. You can check for a whole bunch of health things like vitamin deficiency, thyroid and diabetes if you can pay for tests. Sorry, I realise a lot of these things require money and that is another reason it is absolutely shameful our governments have left us to fend for ourselves, because everyone does not have equal access if money is required to protect yourself.
Measure the air to see how safe it is. Humans breathe out Covid, flu and all the viruses and I think you need some fairly fancy equipment to measure viral particles in the air. You know what humans also exhale that it’s really easy to measure for? Carbon dioxide aka CO2! There are a ton of portable devices out there that can measure CO2 in the air and that gives you an idea of how much re-breathed air you are breathing in. We have the Aranet. So if there’s a high level of CO2 and no air filtration that means you’re breathing a lot of what someone else breathed out. The downside is that it’s not as accurate if there are filters because things that clean air don’t scrub out CO2, but on the upside, if you’re in a place that’s cleaning air that’s great! A related thing I learned while reading about CO2 is that even without Covid, humans don’t function well in rooms high in CO2. Remember being unable to stay awake in class? That was a side effect of the room filling up with students breathing out when there was no ventilation, along with headaches, stuffy noses and difficulty concentrating. I have seen CO2 levels over 2,000 in planes and buses, at my hairdressers and at the doctors. High levels of CO2 mean you need to ventilate, or leave as soon as you can.
Test. Ok, the rapid at-home tests are not that great at accurately telling you someone is definitely negative on any given day, but they are useful if they show a positive result. They might catch an asymptomatic infection no-one knew they had. Use them as another tool to help inform and not a definitive answer that someone is not infected. Mainland Europe and Asia is WAY ahead of the US/UK and is offering cheap tests that test for five common viruses at once! Europe has ones that do three. Don’t buy cheap tests or masks on Amazon because it’s full of fakes. Flowflex from Boots is what we use and we always do the combined method. Unfortunately to properly test with the current variants you need to at least do five days of testing so it gets expensive.
Ask for accommodation to protect yourself and advocate for protections for everyone. One of the hardest things to do is act differently from everyone else and ask for effort with something the majority don’t think is a problem. Wearing a mask sucks, not eating in restaurants sucks, and until there’s society-wide effort the situation is not going to change. There are parents, teachers and groups throughout the country pitching to the schools your children attend that the air should be cleaned. They’re right. Change isn’t going to happen unless we ask for it loud enough we can’t be ignored. It’s outrageous our kids are sent to school to breathe in a virus soup every day! If I had kids I would be homeschooling and if I couldn’t do that I’d be my local school and MP’s worst nightmare. It’s outrageous that healthcare facilities aren’t taking precautions so that immune-compromised people are avoiding treatment because they can’t afford to catch Covid. Remember them from 2020 back when we cared to protect them? They’re still here and they still can’t afford to get Covid. Are they just supposed to disappear from society because the cancer doctor refuses to wear a mask? There are hospitals with no masking in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. We are going backwards with regards to infection control. Remember when wearing masks in 2020 was socially acceptable? We need to re-normalise taking precautions and receiving safe care and that’s something everyone should be doing.
- Wear a good mask in all indoor/inside spaces that are not your home.
- Get an up-to-date vaccine.
- Don’t go to places that are crowded.
- Plan the things you do to be safer.
- Ventilate!
- Clean the air with HEPA filters and FAR-UVC technology.
- Measure the air to see how safe it is.
- Use preventative medicines.
- Test.
- Ask for accommodation to protect yourself and advocate for protections for everyone.
Why should you care about Covid? Read this: I’m worried about you
Want to know more? Read this to understand practical things about Covid: 42 useful things to know about Covid
