Friday, 20 March 2020

5G Doesn’t Cause Coronavirus, but Coronavirus Might Cause 5G

Public Domain: NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML), U.S. NIH

5G does not cause cancer. 5G does not cause coronavirus. Anyone claiming that they do is wrong. They may be wrong out of ignorance, fear, and a desire to make themselves as safe as possible in an uncertain and frightening time. Or they may be some combination of liar, troll, and all-around jerk who enjoy stirring the pot at the one time in recent history when the pot needed stirring the least.

We’ve covered how and why 5G doesn’t cause cancer in the past, so I’m not going to spend too much time debating it again. Today — like every day in this beautiful new reality we are all collectively enjoying — we’re going to talk about how 5G doesn’t — and can’t — cause coronavirus.

Covid-19 Is Caused by a Virus

SARS-CoV-2 is what is known as a single-strand RNA virus. It is similar to the coronaviruses that live in bats and may have been transmitted to humans through a secondary pangolin host. Because this virus is zoonotic — a disease that can be transmitted to humans from animals — we already have a good idea where it came from. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes the disease known as Covid-19. Transmission is primarily droplet-born, though the virus has some ability to live on surfaces when outside the body. The incubation period for Covid-19 is a median of five days, with a range of 0-14 days. Humans were first exposed to SARS-CoV-2, as far as we know right now, at what is known as a wet market in Wuhan, China. (Wet markets are places where meat, fish, and produce are sold, as compared with “dry” markets, where electronic goods or household supplies are sold.)

As seen variously on Reddit and Facebook. Original author unknown. Don’t take medical advice from other people’s handmade signs.

Unlike the Spanish flu pandemic, which killed mostly young and healthy people, Covid-19 appears to hit the elderly hard. Young people who die as a result of SARS-CoV-2 are sometimes dying in systemic reactions called cytokine storms, but the Spanish flu from 1918-1919 was far more likely to cause cytokine storms than Covid-19 appears to be thus far. This is a very good thing.

Once inside the body, Covid-19 attaches itself to a host cell using its spike protein, possibly binding to the angiostatin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors on human cells. SARS-COV-2 has a higher affinity for ACE2 receptors in human cells than the original SARS did.

Once SARS-CoV-2 has penetrated a host cell, it begins replicating the way all viruses do. Your own cells are forced to manufacture more copies of the virus, which spill out of the original host cell into the body. Scientists have taken actual photos of SARS-CoV-2 emerging from human cells cultured in the lab, as shown below:

SARS-CoV-SEM

Image credit: NIAID

We have established where SARS-CoV-2 came from and the species in which it originated. We know how it acts once inside the body. At no point does SARS-CoV-2 rely on or react to the presence of ambient EM energy of the sort that exists in the atmosphere around us on an ongoing basis.

Let’s Talk About 5G

The 5th Generation (5G) radio standard is comprised of several different components. 5G can be deployed in existing sub-6GHz spectrum, which is how T-Mobile and most of the rest of the world do it, or in mmWave signals at 20GHz+ frequency ranges. The sub-6GHz spectrum that T-Mobile is using offers range that’s closer to LTE, but only modestly improves on performance. This type of 5G is more like “LTE+” in terms of the performance benefits you’ll gain than anything like the leap from 3G – LTE.

What about the other type of 5G, mmWave? Millimeter-wave radiation has some distinct characteristics, all of which can be boiled down into a two-sentence summary: It sucks.

Why? Because millimeter waves don’t travel for shit. This chart from SureCall basically summarizes the problem:

The green bar shows 5G’s ability to penetrate anything, including you. Image by SureCall

5G can’t penetrate obstacles. What counts as an obstacle? Well, first you’ve got the usual things: Wood, stone, metal, etc. Then you’ve got the less-usual things, including rain, water molecules in the atmosphere more generally, humans, sheets of paper, and transparent glass. If 5G’s obstacle penetration rate is 15-30x worse than LTE’s, you can bet one of the things it literally isn’t penetrating is you.

This is literally the reason why 5G is such a bad idea to invest in right now. Outside of downtown metro areas and stadiums, there’s virtually nowhere you can meaningfully benefit from having 5G access. 5G hasn’t even been deployed across most of the United States, which is another reason why it can’t possibly be responsible for a disease outbreak. Most of you don’t have it. AT&T customers who see “5G E” on their cell phones, don’t worry — that’s just a lie AT&T made up
and wasn’t punished for. Your “5G E” is exactly the same as everyone else’s “LTE.”

The idea that 5G can cause (or exacerbate) a coronavirus infection is just a twist on the idea that cell phones cause cancer. There’s no truth to either. The problem with the 5G argument is that the types of 5G deployed in China versus in the United States, not to mention Europe, are different. European 5G doesn’t use the same frequencies that American 5G does. American 5G is different from Chinese 5G. Phones that support all of the bands in question don’t even exist yet, and 5G deployments in America are tiny. The reason why companies like Qualcomm have been caught distributing bad 5G reports in the first place is that existing 5G service just isn’t very good.

We already know where coronavirus comes from. We’ve found the animal reservoirs. We’ve identified the source of the outbreak and, in many cases, traced local infections back to specific individuals or group events. The idea that 5G could cause coronavirus outbreaks is being generated by trolls and liars, aided by frightened people who don’t understand how all of this works. Don’t be fooled. The problem with 5G is that 5G is a lousy idea and a bad economic deal for most people right now. It doesn’t cause cancer. It doesn’t cause coronavirus, either.

But — hilariously — this might not continue to be true. If Americans remain stuck at home and reliant on broadband service, it’s potentially possible that we’d see companies respond to this by building out more capacity in local homes and areas. In some places, especially cities, 5G might be an effect short-range backhaul. If companies knew that people were mostly working from home, they might be more willing to build these deployments at the scale required to make them affordable.

5G doesn’t cause coronavirus — but there’s a chance that coronavirus could cause 5G (deployments).

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