INFECTION PREVENTION AND CONTROL
Combating coronavirus using practical measures
Sarah Bailey MSc, WELL AP, senior consultant at built environment consultancy, QED Environmental Services in Australia, takes a look at the ‘basics’ of the coronavirus, and – in answer to the many questions that the company has received on the subject from its customers – discusses some of the key steps that can be taken both within buildings, and in the wider community, to mitigate the virus’s spread.
As this article goes to print, it is over a 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 (of 1957, 1968, and 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 does not generate the kind of interest (and panic) that a novel disease does. Previous pandemics have not had the social impact upon Australia that COVID- 19 has had – there was short-lived panic about the Swine ‘Flu in 2009, the first SARS outbreak, in 2003, and the MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, in 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.
Rapidly changing information 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 this virus is, and how we can best keep our occupants safe
Spike glycoprotein (S): required for entry of the infectious virion particle
Membrane protein (M): most abundant viral protein
Envelope glycoprotein (E): smallest among the major structural proteins
Nucleocapsid protein (N) + single-stranded positive sense RNA genome
Lipid bilayer Fig 1: The structural composition of SARS-CoV-2.
from it – if we can? My aim will thus be to provide some basic information on the virus, and the story so far, and to offer some guidance so that it is easier to spot the potential mitigating actions that may work, and to discard the ones that will not. As a microbiologist who 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. I must emphasise, however, that knowledge on the coronavirus is being accumulated rapidly, on an ongoing basis, and that some of the advice is accordingly changing week by week. For the most up-to-date and reliable information, I would suggest visiting the websites of your local health department and the World Health Organization.
‘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
This article, titled ‘Coronavirus SARS-COV-2 – The Basics’, was first published in the March 2021 issue of Healthcare Facilities, the official magazine of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, Australia (IHEA). HEJ would like to thank the author, the IHEA, and the Australian magazine’s publishers, Adbourne Publishing, for allowing its re-publication here in slightly edited form.
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 zombies.
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 the host’s living cells to carry that process out for it. A virus sticks to a living cell using the spike protein, injects the strand of RNA into the cell, and then the infected individual’s own enzymes and cellular machinery helpfully get to work translating that blueprint into more virus particles, and these are released from the cell. Then, these viruses continue infecting more cells, sometimes making the host sick, and also releasing virus particles from the person’s body to infect other people.
May 2021 Health Estate Journal 23 Major
structural proteins
American Society for Microboiology
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