Concern Over Sleep Apnea and Coronavirus Transmission

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 7:51 am

Lifeisabeach wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 5:42 am

Hannibal 2 wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 3:19 am

Lifeisabeach wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 27, 2020 9:02 pm

Janknitz wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:12 pm

Truly, if you are positive for Covid 19 or have suspicious symptoms, you should be isolated in a single room and not share any air space with family members. It doesn't matter if you are on CPAP or not, as long as you are breathing (and certainly if you are sneezing and coughing) you are shedding virus. You should not be sharing a bathroom with anyone either as they have found virus in the GI tract and there are GI symptoms as well.

We set up the 2nd floor of our house to be a quarantine zone if it comes to that. Everyone should be looking at their homes and working out a plan to isolate a zone as much as possible. Supply the area in advance with essentials to minimize movement in and out of the area. Make it as comfortable now as you need it to be for a 2 week or longer quarantine.

I would not stop using my CPAP in that isolation. I want to wake up every morning and have a fighting chance of surviving. If my O2 sats are already in the toilet from sleep apnea all night, plus all those stress hormones, that would greatly diminish my chances against virus.

This. Exactly this.

My understanding is that by the time you start displaying symptoms of covid-19 you will already have spread it to others, if this is true (and I'm sure you'll correct me if it's not), then quarantine at this stage would be akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

"Potentially" have spread it to others. Likely, really, but you don't want to keep cross-contaminating each other when sick. If you are "expelling" a virus, better it not go to even someone who has it already because if it does, you just added to their existing viral load.

Do viruses build up like that ? There is no way to isolate someone in my southwestern style house. Its a open floorplan with vaulted ceilings and family room/living room/ dining and kitchen all connected. We have one big barn door to keep dogs and cats apart but so it wouldn't mess up the air flow it has a big floor to ceiling wire mesh air vent right next to it. Well plus a/c and celling fans recirculating air constantly.

Admittedly my household is unusually conducive to splitting up. It's just me, my wife, and the dogs. I have a small 2-story house with the upstairs largely unused. I can self-isolate up there very comfortably as a result. The standing advice is to self-isolate to one's bedroom and wear a mask when leaving it and maintain the usual hand-sanitizing recommendations. But 1-2 weeks in the bedroom will make for a very miserable time so if one can do better and are prepared to do better, then it can make that stretch a lot easier to suffer through.

babydinosnoreless wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:07 pm

Pugsy wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 10:38 am

Dog Slobber wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 28, 2020 10:20 am

And this is a WalMart problem, not just a hoarder problem.

It's mainly a hoarder problem in my book. It's easy to get around any store limits...just go out and come back in and use a different cashier.
My husband asked how these people are paying for this stuff....answer...cash believe it or not. Where they are getting the cash is another question and we can't track cash purchases.

The stores can put all the limits in the world but people will find a way to bypass the system. Probably why WalMart hasn't bothered to try very much. They know that there's not a damn thing they can do about people buying limits and go put those products in their car and turned around and come right back in and load up again.

Walmart managers get to decide limits for their stores at least here. We have one Walmart that is limiting milk to 1 gallon. Less than 5 miles from another that has no limits. The neighborhood market (walmart grocery only) has limits on meat but not milk. Its a crap shoot. People are posting on fb when they find a store with stuff others are looking for. Some restaurants are selling packets of eggs, milk, yeast and other stuff so it doesn't go bad. Crazy times !

Yeah, it's annoying and while we aren't hoarding here, the difficulty in finding items thanks to the hoarders is forcing people who otherwise would be more restrained to hoard when we can. Since hand sanitizers are virtually impossible to find, we're going to have to make our own. I managed to score a couple bottles of alcohol from Walmart recently to make it, but they haven't had any shipments in since. I learned from someone at a pharmacy today that Walmart and some other chains are diverting their shipments of key supplies to New York since the situation is so dire. It's possible we may not see another bottle of this and some other stuff for a couple months or more.

Hopefully, intubation will be reserved for those who truly NEED it,
--not to avoid using negative pressure rooms for every contagious patient.

I wouldn't worry. Remember you breath even with out the machine but not for as long if you quit. Take care of yourself too.

If the CPAP air is filtered going in (cpap users breath) It would seem like a no-brainer to filter the air on the exhale. If most people are quite comfortable believing that they are protected by the $1 white mask, why don't we cpap users just put a white mask over our cpap mask. There......done! We don't get covid and we don't shed it either.

On the walmart deal.. Our walmart had a guy standing at a door guarding all the TP and you could buy 1 package. Ha.

kong wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 27, 2020 5:08 pm

I believe the concerns about CPAP spreading COVID-19 are mainly theoretical at this point. Now is not a good time to try to have a dental appliance made.

Around here, dental offices are closed except for dental emergencies. So that's not going to happen.

Kenji Lopez Alt is a food scientist, and he has done a lot of research on Coronavirus and food safety. But I thought this podcast has a lot of good general information as well about the risk of exposure to the virus on surfaces: https://www.splendidtable.org/story/foo ... -lopez-alt

And his website is being updated frequently about this topic: https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/foo ... guide.html

While it's not directly related to CPAP, it has good, solid information, and I think alleviates a lot of anxiety about how to protect yourself since everyone has to eat. If you stay free of the virus, you don't have to worry about your CPAP.

I don't know if this has been said in this thread, but it seems the main problem is the exhaled breath from someone that is infected. It normally just vents into the ambient air in the room. It seems to me, being just a dumb detective, that there are two ways to try to deal with this in a mechanical sense:

1) Capture and vent the air into a different location. Our clothes dryers do it, ventilators do it. Surely some mechanical engineer could think something up that is minimally invasive to overall space in which exhaled air is vented to an outside
location. Venting directly into your neighbor's window is frowned upon.
2) Capture exhaled breath and route it into a place upon which it is sanitized. This is likely the more complex of the two solutions.