FEATURE ARTICLES
CORONAVIRUS SARS-COV-2 – THE BASICS Sarah Bailey QED Environmental Services As this article goes to print, it is almost exactly one year since Australia entered the first lockdown due to COVID-19, an event that heralded a massive change in the way we live, work, buy toilet rolls and socialise. For most people, this was the first pandemic in Australia in living memory, as the semi-regular Influenza pandemics (1957, 1968, 2009) that have occurred since the infamous 1918 pandemic, and spikes in infection and deaths from influenza such as in 2019, where over 900 people died, are often dismissed by the public as a “normal” occurrence, as ‘flu is familiar, and do not generate the kind of interest (and panic) that a novel disease does.
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revious pandemics have not had the impact upon Australia that COVID-19 has had – there was short lived panic about the Swine ‘Flu (2009), the first SARS (2003) and MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (2012), but this did not translate into issues for the country that impacted day to day living. COVID-19 very quickly became something very different, and has changed the world as we know it, leaving no part of the globe unaffected. However, since the beginning of the pandemic, so much information has been available, much of it rapidly changing and a large amount of it from disreputable sources, that it has been hard to find a good overview for someone who is not a virologist that contains the key information required to make sense of the pandemic, and what can be done about it within a building. This article came about from the many questions we have been asked by our customers, both in healthcare and in commercial properties about just exactly what is this virus, and how do we keep our occupants safe from it – if we can? And is this person trying to sell me something that will work, or snake oil? This article aims to provide some basic knowledge of the virus and the story so far, and provide some key knowledge so that it is easier to spot the actions that may work, and discard the ones that will not. As someone who is a microbiologist and has worked in Infection Prevention and Control as well as in the hospital and commercial sector, hopefully I can bring together the information we have into a useful article. Disclaimer: The knowledge about coronavirus is being accumulated so rapidly, and advice changing as we
know more, that this article will likely have some sections that may be out of date even before it goes to press. For the most up to date and reliable information please visit your local health department website and the World Health Organisation Website.
Know thy enemy It is always easier to deal with a problem if you know exactly what you are dealing with. For all the reports that start with “it’s a coronavirus”, or “it’s an RNA virus”, what does this mean, and how does it impact on what we do about it? Firstly, viruses are not alive! When I was studying microbiology, this always made me feel slightly nervous about them – they aren’t alive, but they can infect you and make you sick? If they aren’t alive then you can’t kill them! They are fascinating – they are like a really tiny zombie! As a basic description, SARS-Cov-2 is a strand of RNA (Ribonucleic Acid), wrapped up in a bubble of fat (lipid) with some bits of protein stuck in it, which include the spike proteins that are important for vaccine development (more on this later). RNA is the chemical that makes up the genes of the virus. Basically, the recipe or blueprint for what that organism is and what it will do. To make more viruses, the virus needs to copy the RNA strand and produce more protein and fat to assemble new viruses. However, a virus does not have the right enzymes and chemicals inside it to be able to do this, as it is not alive – so it hijacks your living cells to carry that process out for it.
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