KN-95 – Analog Artist Digital World

A COVID outbreak of an Antarctica research station has forced a temporary travel ban to the site. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has confirmed that 10% of the people at the McMurdo Station have tested positive so far. There are 885 researchers at the station. That means about 88 researches have been infected. The outbreak was first reported by NBC News of November 4, 2022.

NSF operates the station on the southern tip of Antarctica’s Ross Island. Measure are now being taken to try and control the outbreak. “Consistent with the U.S. National Science Foundation’s commitment to balance research and operational needs while containing the spread of Covid cases in Antarctica, NSF is implementing a pause on all travel to the continent for the next two weeks, effective immediately, while we reassess the situation,” agency officials said in a statement released November 5, 2022.

Essential travel including medical staff is still being allowed. In a half hearted, pussy footed memo, the agency said it “highly recommends” KN-95 masks be worn at all times and will provide them to residents. Most COVID protocols, like quarantines, and multiple PCR tests have been relaxed, allowing the virus easy access to spread in this frozen petri dish. Of course these people are socially isolated from the rest of the world on this tiny island literally at the frozen ends of the earth.

The “Gadget” was the plutonium device detonated at the Trinity Test site in July 1945. Manhattan Project scientists had to overcome difficult scientific and engineering challenges to design and build the Gadget. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.

The Gadget was much larger than the COVID-19 virus but its deadly impact has been very much the same. Over 5 million people have died fro COVID-19 world wide and America leads the world in the number of deaths with over 800,000.

Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki about 199,000 died. A 2016 study concluded that, in the United States’ nuclear weapons plants since 1945, some 107,394 American workers contracted cancer and other serious diseases, and 33,480 of these workers have died as a result. People continue to die from something that they can not see and therefor do not believe.

Omicron is spreading as fast as a nuclear explosion. Omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant. This means the infected person can breath out the virus much easier than if it settled deep inn the lungs. That allows that person to infect many others while perhaps being asymptomatic. “Strikingly, Omicron was 4-fold more infectious than wild type [the original version of the virus] and 2-fold more infectious than Delta,” Garcia-Beltran and colleagues wrote in their study.

In one case two fully vaccinated people were isolating in a hotel across the hall from each other. Each tested negative prior to isolation. Neither person left their room and yet they both became infected with Omicron. It is believed that the brief moment hotel staff opened one door and then the other to deliver food was when the virus spread from one person to the other across the hall. It may take less of the airborne partials to start an infection. It is more important than ever to wear a well fit KN-95 mask and to stay further than six feet from others indoors and out. January will result in an amazing nuclear wave of infection.