williams. can covert 19 cause bad breath. ptosis can be caused by a wide range of different factors from inadequate dental hygiene to a more serious underlying condition but the w.h.o. doesn't list it as a symptom for covert 19 however there is an interesting connection between bad breath and the virus mouthwash sales have spiked during the pandemic which i guess was to be expected i mean plenty of people probably hope that using mouthwash is regularly will have a preventative effect even though there is currently no evidence that that garbling with them protects you either that or or breathing into a mask all the time has made people hyper aware of how their own breath smells. can you catch coded 19 from drinking unfiltered tap water. there is no evidence you can get covert 19 from drinking treated water and the risk of transmission through water in general even untreated wastewater appears to be very low even when the viruses genetic material can be detected in untreated water in most cases i

are your questions now over to our science correspondent and that's derrick williams. does sars kovi to incorporate genetic material into your d.n.a. that remains even when the disease is passed. a number of different viruses among them for example hiv or herpes viruses use a variety of different methods to incorporate their own genetic material into that of the cells that they invade in fact a substantial portion of human d.n.a. we think around 8 percent isn't strictly speaking human in origin it's genetic information from by risk is that integrated into the human genome at some point in the far distant past and has been hanging around in our genetic code ever since which is it's kind of freaky when you think about it i mean it's thought that these sequences might be involved actually in a wide range of what we consider to be non infectious diseases like cancer or or dementia but source code too isn't the kind of virus that replicates by integrating into our genome it doesn't have to invade the cell nucleus where our d.n.a. is it can find everything that it needs to m

time to head over to our science correspondent derrick williams he's got answers to some of the questions you've been sending us on the coronavirus. how different is saz cove 2 to other viruses that infect us for example to people who catch influenza sometimes have no symptoms yes although asymptomatic is a is a pretty squishy term we've known for decades that people who don't report flu symptoms can test positive as carriers for the bug and older estimates usually put the number of asymptomatic carriers for flu at around 50 percent much cited british study from 2014 however determined an even larger number of people infected with influenza never develop symptoms 77 percent to be exact now if that's correct it means not even one in 4 people who catch the flu will ever show any signs of it one way or the other even if the estimates don't all agree there's plenty of evidence showing that it's quite common for us to catch a range of other viruses and show no signs of illness and there's also broad agreement that those asymptomatic carriers are likely contributing significantly to the spread

and now it's time for your questions here's our science correspondent derrick williams. for how many days are as symptomatic people contagious. this is one of the questions that medical professionals would love an answer to but it's pretty complex and we haven't even nailed down answers to to simpler related questions like like what percentage of people who get the disease can even be classified as as asymptomatic or or how infectious they are you most remember last month there was an uproar when a w.h.o. official appeared to say that there were indications that asymptomatic people very rarely passed on the disease to others that was that was followed by a lot of backtracking but maybe it helps to look at what we do know one expert i read on this said that transmission from people with symptoms generally tails off completely within 8 days after the onset of those symptoms and that he thought it unlikely that an asymptomatic person would be infectious for longer than that that sounds plausible to me but it doesn't constitute proof. and before we let you go here's a story

williams. vaccines work for young children or be tailored for adults. this question addresses one of the reasons why it's a good thing to have so many different teams working on on so many different back scenes there's a widely acknowledged problem with testing not only vaccines but but new therapies in general which is that early trials in particular are usually conducted on groups of healthy adults under $65.00 and of course they aren't the people who need it most with covered 19 elderly men with co-morbidities are the group that's most at risk but especially in early safety and efficiency trials nobody will be trying vaccine candidates out on backward because not only could it be dangerous it could also skew the data and lead researchers to false conclusions the same holds true for testing new vaccines in children it can be risky because you can't just treat them. like little adults they they can react differently to vaccines it's certainly possible this is not likely that children and adult

well time for your questions now and that means over to a science correspondent derrick williams. what is the size of the coronavirus in microns. with all of these large scale animations of coronaviruses that i look at every day sometimes it's hard to remember how tiny they actually are to answer this question let's 1st get the terms down micron is an old way to say micro meter which is one millionth of a meter to put that maybe in terms that we can visualize it takes a 1000 micro metres to make a single millimeter now the small ones that is a virus is much smaller it's down in what's called the nanometer range a 1000 nanometers makes up a single microcomputer at around $125.00 nanometers in diameter source code 2 is actually a pretty large virus at least among the viruses that in fact humans but it would still take 8 of them lined up to stretch a single micro metre or micron if you prefer. hair is always used to illustrate stuff like this a human here is around 50 microns across so it would take around $400.00 coronaviruses end to end just to span the width of a human hair you kn

now you got to ask the questions here's our science correspondent derrick williams. i've heard research just talk about trying to mute the immune response but also saying that a young stronger immune system is more successful in fighting off covered 19 is not a contradiction. to understand the apparent contradiction here you have to understand that there are are different stages of covert 19 that patients can go through the 1st is usually an initial infection in the upper respiratory tract and that's usually where it stays with most people that's where having a strong fast acting immune system is really great it's able to keep the disease in check and eventually wipe it out in some cases it keeps it so effectively unchecked that you might not even notice that you had it but in more severe forms of the disease if the virus eventually makes it to the loans or to other organs it can kick in a severe immune response and when that happens the immune system can start attacking not just diseased tissue but but healthy tissue as well that's when doctors have to step in and t

there are questions now anderson's correspondent derrick williams. can you tell us more about dexamethasone. dexa methods own is one of the drugs that doctors now prescribe at that critical stage of coke at 19 that i just mentioned when the immune system has gone into overdrive and starts attacking healthy tissue and the body a major study in britain that's still in peer review discovered that in critically ill patients who need respiratory support the compounds lowers mortality by between a 5th and and a 3rd which is actually pretty huge that's a method zone is what's known as a corticosteroid and it's widely used to treat many different conditions that cause painful or dangerous inflammation it's also and immuno suppressant so it can help calm down the immune system when it's running a mock but that also makes doctors wary about about giving patients the drug too early when the immune system needs to be active it's not a new drug but one that's been approved for use for well over 50 years now so so it's cheap it's widely available and perhaps most

williams with your questions. we've heard about the underlying diseases and conditions that can influence the severity of college 19 outcomes but does viral load also affect so verity. when i began looking into this i quickly realized that there's still no clear answer to this question partly because the amount of virus in the patient's body changes from day to day as the disease progresses we know from other diseases that that high viral loads are linked to infectiousness but do they also affect disease severity in covert 19 well the information coming out of the studies this kind of conflict in a recent fairly large scale one for example found a clear link between mortality and high viral load in hospitalized patients and even suggested it could be used as a tool for stratifying patient risk but other studies that have measured viral loads in for example children who had very mild forms of the disease found they were generally carrying even more virus than adults who develop severe forms of the disease and then

williams with your questions. we've heard about the underlying diseases and conditions that can influence the severity of coded 19 outcomes but does viral load also affect some verity. when i began looking into this i quickly realized that there's still no clear answer to this question partly because the amount of virus in a patient's body changes from day to day as the disease progresses we know from other diseases that that high viral loads are linked to infectiousness but do they also affect disease severity in covert 19 well the information coming out of the studies is kind of conflicting a recent a fairly large scale one for example found a clear link between mortality and high viral load in hospitalized patients and even suggested it could be used as a tool for stratifying patient risk but other studies that have measured viral loads in for example children who had very mild forms of the disease found they were generally carrying even more virus than adults who develop severe forms of the disease and then th

williams with your questions. we've heard about the underlying diseases and conditions that can influence the severity of coded 19 outcomes but does viral load also affect some verity. when i began looking into this i quickly realized that there's still no clear answer to this question partly because the amount of virus in a patient's body changes from day to day as the disease progresses we know from other diseases that that high viral loads are linked to infectiousness but do they also affect disease severity in covert 19 well the information coming out of the studies this kind of conflict in a recent fairly large scale one for example found a clear link between mortality and high viral load in hospitalized patients and even suggested it could be used as a tool for stratifying patient risk but other studies that have measured viral loads in for example children who had very mild forms of the disease found they were generally carrying even more virus than adults who develop severe forms of the disease and then th

williams to look into a topics you bring up. to people living with hiv have an increased chance of dying from kovac 19 a number of different studies have looked at this issue and although the data is still pretty limited mostly they agree that people who are living with hiv and that are on an effective treatment program where the antiviral medication are not any more likely to contract or die from covert 19 than 10 people who don't have a child in the u.s. centers for disease control currently lists having the immunodeficiency disease as as only may be affecting outcomes a key aspect of that though is certainly going to be whether or not hiv patients continue to get the antiviral therapies that are are keeping their disease in check the united nations program that's responsible for global action on hiv has warns that in 2020 there could be up to half a 1000000 additional aids deaths and sub-saharan africa of loan caused not by patients catching covert 19 but because it's disrupting supply lines for and access to the medications

. >> derrick williams should have been celebrating his 55th birthday last week. instead, you heard right there from his fiancee, derrick died of the coronavirus after ten days spent in the icu. he was an air force veteran, he did charity work, and he was an unstoppable force of positive energy in obstacle course races up and down the west coast. according to the nbc affiliate in san diego, one of derrick's favorite things to do at his beloved spartan races was to find the slowest person, the person in last place that day, and then stay with them and encourage them to finish. probably a life lesson in that, don't you think? maybe next time you see someone struggling, stay with them. and keep derrick in your thoughts. thank you for watching, and letting us into your homes in these extraordinary times. our coverage continues with the fabulous katy tur right after a quick break. break.need with less of the sugar you don't. [grunting noise] i'll take that. woohoo! 30 grams of protein and 1 gram of sugar. ensure max protein. with nutrients to support immune health. ens