COVID-19 Awareness

COVID-Safe Scout Badges

Special thanks to thatKatherine, who made the badge graphics! You can claim your own from Katherine’s site.

Merit badges

Proficiency badges

Mastery badges

Travel behaviours

In the “before,” I travelled a lot for business, some consulting, and more often for standards development work. Since November 2023, I’ve started travelling internationally again. It’s uncomfortable, but it can’t be helped for some things. International travel should be limited to help limit our carbon footprints, too, so limited travel is just better overall.

When travelling, I carry my Aranet-4 CO₂ meter and wear an N95 mask whenever I am not eating and am with other people, e.g., on the plane, in airports, on public transport, in taxis, on the street, in meetings, and in public areas of the hotel.

Canadian COVID Risk

Like most countries, Canada and our Provinces and Territories have released public health measures to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infections. As part of that, the provinces have dropped the testing, providing crucial data that decision-makers and the general public need to assess the risk. Dr. Tara Moriarty, https://twitter.com/moriartylab, at COVID-19 Resources Canada, provides a tremendous Canadian resource. The national and provincial risk levels based on the available data are displayed on the risk dashboard on the site. This is likely your best resource to assess your COVID-19 risk:

Masks and ventilation

The increasing prevalence of respiratory illnesses other than COVID-19, including influenza variants like influenza A and B and H3N2, along with high transmission levels of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), make a strong case for wearing an N95 or better mask whenever you are indoors with other people whose vaccination status you are unsure about. Improving indoor air quality by bringing in more fresh air 💨 🪟, adding HEPA filtration, and wearing an N95 or FFP3 respirator or an N95 or P100 elastomeric mask with an exhalation filter 😷 is your best shot at reducing 🦠 transmission. The key is found in Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model 🧀.

The Swiss cheese model of accident causation is used in risk analysis and risk management, including aviation safety, engineering, healthcare, and emergency service organizations, and as the principle behind layered security, as used in computer security and defence in depth. It likens human systems to multiple slices of Swiss cheese, which have randomly placed and sized holes in each slice, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by the differing layers and types of defences which are “layered” behind each other. Therefore, in theory, lapses and weaknesses in one defence do not allow a risk to materialize (e.g., a hole in each slice in the stack aligning with holes in all other slices) since other defences also exist (e.g., other slices of cheese), to prevent a single point of failure. The model was originally formally propounded by James T. Reason of the University of Manchester and has since gained widespread acceptance. It is sometimes called the “cumulative act effect.”

[2]

The government of Canada has a good page describing the different types of respirators.

I wear Eclipse Innovations ARC N95 or 3M Aura disposable respirators for most day-to-day activities.

I also wear a 3M 6000 half-face elastomeric respirator with P100 inhalation filters and a 604 exhalation filter for those times when I’m concerned that the viral load may be too high for my N95 or where the duration of exposure may be quite long, say, all day:

3M P100 inhalation filters:

3M 6000 exhalation filter:

If you’re looking to buy a half-mask that is easier to communicate through, both 3M and Honeywell have half-masks with speech diaphragms; however, as far as I can tell, neither product has an exhalation filter.

If you’re in Canada, try these sources:

• The Canadian Shield (they sell Eclipse Innovations masks)
• Canada Strong – Better Masks, Made in Canada!
• Eclipse Innovations
• MSA Safety

There are others, including 3M, North Safety, and Honeywell.

The Clean Air Crew has some good suggestions for elastomeric respirators: https://cleanaircrew.org/masks/

The ACGIH has an excellent guide to protecting workers from airborne viruses here.

COVID-19 related research papers

I found a great resource in Jessica Wildfire’s essays on OK Doomer, including the following COVID-19-related research papers.

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References

[1] “What’s Swiss Cheese got to do with wearing masks, COVID-19 vaccines and all we do to overcome COVID-19?,” AMS homepage – Anglo Medical Scheme, https://www.angloms.co.za/portal/ams/whats-swiss-cheese (accessed Sep. 12, 2023).

[2] “Swiss cheese model,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model (accessed Sep. 12, 2023).