Is it OK to go caving?

[PeteHall]

Two I think...

This might help: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/our-plan-to-rebuild-the-uk-governments-covid-19-recovery-strategy/our-plan-to-rebuild-the-uk-governments-covid-19-recovery-strategy

 

[pwhole]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52968160

It may just be a blip in statistics and obviously deaths are at least a few weeks behind infections, but can we be cautiously optimistic?

Cautiously optimistic for about a month ago - when we were in more of a lockdown. Now half the country seem to have given up on that particular tactic, including the government, we shall have to see what happens in a month. I'm happy to be proved wrong, but I doubt this is over. Social distancing isn't happening in most places I'm looking - like my street and in town. We are definitely not at two! They/we just want us to be, which isn't the same thing at all. All the countries that aren't doing proper lockdowns are in big trouble, and the unfit members of our public certainly haven't got any fitter in the last month. I'm fit, but not as fit as I was when I was caving every week. Sigh.

 

[The Old Ruminator]

The trouble is that our technological and world travelling society just does know how to cope with it. We have had many pandemics over the years 1889, 1898, 1918. 1957,1968. They are a sequential part of life and will continue to be so. Mass media just spreads disinformation and fear. Ultimately we will have to adjust our profligate ways and learn to live with it. I hardly think that stopping caving will make the slightest difference. Oh, I think that caving HQ's are rated as " Hostels " so no ruddy chance there for months.
.

 

[Fulk]

This might seem like a very na?ve question, but can the virus survive in static water?

One might reasonably assume that if it got deposited in running water it would get carried away quite quickly, but suppose someone deposited a load of corona virus in a pool or puddle; what would happen to it?

 

[andrewmcleod]

The trouble is that our technological and world travelling society just does know how to cope with it. We have had many pandemics over the years 1889, 1898, 1918. 1957,1968.

We also used to rarely live past 60 and had 60% child mortality. Bugger that.

 

[mikem]

But it was a Golden Age 

 

[nearlywhite]

I think that caving HQ's are rated as " Hostels " so no ruddy chance there for months.

the BEC is an adult entertainment store so might be considered a more essential service.

And Corona viruses will denature in static water in hours, the only way would be to have a corpse with a viral load in it. So beware of dead minks

 

[mikem]

When you say minx, are you referring to the Belfry belles?  :tease:

 

[The Old Ruminator]

More misinformation. I hear today that 27 cases at our local hospital that supposedly tested positive were in fact negative. Maybe that's why the South Wests R Rate has suddenly gone down again. This from an internal source so it may not be public. Mooched about Mendip today looking longingly at cave entrances. Lots of climbers enjoying themselves, Grrrrr.

 

[mikem]

By 22nd May, South West had only 8% more deaths than 5 year average, whilst Wales was 12% & other areas of England were all around 20 to 30%, apart from North East at 40%.

 

[langcliffe]

This might seem like a very na?ve question, but can the virus survive in static water?

A long time, apparently, but you could always saturate it with UV light before you crawl through it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7091381/

 

[Fulk]

Hmmm, perhaps it wasn't such a na?ve question after all!

This paper ? Survival of Coronaviruses in Water and Wastewater ? suggests that coronavisuses can survive for 100 days in water at 4?C and 10 days in water at 23?C (unless the water is contaminated wastewater). In which case, if you happen to be crawling through (static) water at 'standard British cave temperature', then if a coronavirus had been dumped in there, it could stay active for somewhere between 10 and 100 days. However, this paper is dated 2009 ? so presumably the conclusions can't automatically be applied to a new, super 2020 coronavirus (?).

Thank you, langcliffe.

 

[pwhole]

Viruses do manage quite well in caves. Whether they can manage for long without an animal host I dunno, but it does seem an environment in which a virus can thrive, suggesting cool, dark and damp conditions are preferred to hot, bright and and dry. This is an interesting (and somewhat prescient) article on SARS from Nature in 2017:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

Also this:

https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/did-coronavirus-come-bat-guano-trade

The exact mechanism by which the coronavirus jumped from a bat to a human is the subject of intense global research. Scientists have suggested that because the virus is found in bats' blood and saliva, transmission could have occurred from a bite. But bats don?t commonly bite humans.

"Most bats do not bite, particularly the kinds of bats associated with coronavirus outbreaks," Siegel said. 

Instead, humans mostly get infected from bats merely by spending time with them, such as when workers collect bat guano from a cave, or when miners or spelunkers spend hours breathing in the same confined space as a bat colony. 

Had anyone considered being coughed on by a bat, rather than a colleague?

 

[mikem]

That would probably depend on the bat having been coughed on by somebody else first....

 

[kay]

That would probably depend on the bat having been coughed on by somebody else first....

Given that there's a theory that it arrived on a bat before it got into the Wuhan live market, not necessarily. Maybe it already has a world-wide distribution in bats? Just a point of logic, not a serious suggestion.

 

[PeteHall]

I appreciate that the above comments are more theoretical than serious, but they are also impossible, theoretically or not.

These viruses mutate very quickly. Bats populations don't travel right across the world. Even if the virus did manage to spread from one population to the neighbouring population and so on, to spread across the entire world, it would have mutated along the way and not be the same virus by the time there was any kind of significant distribution.

In regard to the idea that it could then be caught from a bat, perhaps in a country where thousands of bats live in one place and people mine the bat sh!t for work, perhaps even explorers wading knee-deep through bat sh!t would do it, but in the UK, really? The most bats I've ever seen in one cave was about 40, the chances of getting sufficient virus from a population like this is zero.

 

[nearlywhite]

This paper ? Survival of Coronaviruses in Water and Wastewater ? suggests that coronavisuses can survive for 100 days in water at 4?C and 10 days in water at 23?C (unless the water is contaminated wastewater). In which case, if you happen to be crawling through (static) water at 'standard British cave temperature', then if a coronavirus had been dumped in there, it could stay active for somewhere between 10 and 100 days. However, this paper is dated 2009 ? so presumably the conclusions can't automatically be applied to a new, super 2020 coronavirus (?).

It was an interesting paper, nice find.

There are at least a couple of assumptions here though: that filtered tap is the same as cave (ones with biological matter are considerably shorter 2-4 days albeit at 23C), this coronavirus is less labile than the tested one (which early reports very much doubt) and that T99/99.9 is the point at which it no longer becomes infectious. Though we don't know what the minimal infective dose is for Covid 19, the non droplet transmission from static water (would need ingestion/contact), the dispersion within a body of water and distribution from a human host would be difficult to isolate into a narrow isolated pocket, makes me think it is highly unlikely to be worth mooting.

 

[pwhole]

I wasn't seriously suggesting that you could catch it from a bat in the UK, nor that bats transmitted it around the world - clearly that was by the international travel of humans. It was more that the conditions in caves are such that the virus may not be inactivated as easily as it would be outdoors, so 'dosing' a cave from an infectious person could mean it persists for a lot longer than 72 hours. I write 'inactivated' as there still doesn't seem to be a consensus as to whether viruses 'live' and 'die'. They seem more like bio-automata to me.

What I don't know is whether viruses must have a host and be transmitted to a new host within a certain time-frame to remain viable - or whether they can just sit there on a rock for months or even years until a new host appears. But if an infectious caver coughed on or near a bat, could that then allow the virus to persist longer? I have no idea whether we can give it back to bats either. I'm sure others with more knowledge can help, but it's not an area of study I ever thought I'd have to indulge in! And trying to work too means reading long papers is rather tricky.

I suspect the fact that there's a virus lab in this area is because there's also a lot of caves, bats and viruses in this area, so it's handy. I'm sure all sorts of sinister machinations go on in every country, but generally killing off large chunks of your consumer populations isn't a good way of developing a thriving economy, so I doubt many governments, however evil, actually want a Covid-19 epidemic. It may well have been caused by an accident, but that's one for the spies and sadbots to decide, not us. Funny how no-one ever mentions Putin on the news any more - he's virtually disappeared as a news item these days. Now that's more interesting to me if you're into conspiracies.

 

[David Rose]

My friends, it is clear that this disaster is the work of Dr Evil. The big question is, does he live in Seattle or Wuhan? It will take detective with the brilliance of Rowan Atkinson's Johnny English to find out.

 

[PeteHall]

[gmod]Discussion on the origins of Coronavirus split to


https://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=26601.0
[/gmod]