Photo by Pixpoetry via Unsplash
Brews shared pre-pandemic proved inspirational to Mark Apelt to build a device that seems appropriate in an age of heightened awareness of disease and germs.
The stay-at-home West End dad was out with some other neighborhood fathers sharing some downtime and comparing notes on life in general and parenting in particular. Two had been at a child’s birthday party the day before. “We’re talking about the younger kid, who hadn’t quite figured out how to blow out the candles and had a little runny nose and everything, and when he blew, you could just see the spit kind of flying all over the cake, and we were all joking about it,” he says.
“That led to a conversation of just like, it’s kind of a weird concept that we just all accept as normal, blowing out the candles on a cake with little kids, all the stuff that gets all over the cake. [It’s] not even necessarily a germ thing, [it’s] just like, kind of gross to spit all over a cake, and [there’s] nothing else we do that with, that we would eat food that somebody else blew on ... [like], ‘OK, would you like your hot dog? I’ll blow on it for you.’ ”
Before taking on at-home dad duty, Apelt had been a high school science teacher, and that training kicked in. And an idea that started with a joke took on some an altogether different form after a couple of weeks. What if there was a device that would snuff out candles without sharing all those germs and such?
He got to work. The first prototype was something akin to a vuvuzela, the loud, long horn seen at soccer matches in South Africa and the Summer Olympics in Brazil in 2016. After some 17 prototypes tried over about 40 birthday cakes, there was a winner. It’s called a Blowzee, and it went on the market in mid-March.
Image courtesy Mark Apelt
You blow into the device, and that activates a fan that blows out the candles. Your breath, though, is redirected back toward you.
The entire process, from an idea brewed up while sharing brews to receiving the product from the manufacturer, took about a year and a half, Apelt says. He contacted people across the world, from CAD designers to manufacturers, completing the design last December.
Response to it has been positive, and not just from the germ-aware; kids are obsessed with it and love to play with it, he says. “I’m surprised how much people like it.”
Apelt has always enjoyed tinkering in the garage, but this is his first true invention. It’s also been a learning experience, how something goes from an idea to manufacturing to marketing. “I would love to come up with some other ideas,” he says. “At the moment, it’s a one-off. If I have a great idea, I could definitely do it much faster and more efficiently.”
Good Behavior
For many, blowing out birthday candles on cake has always had a grossness factor, but it was boosted into a health concern with the arrival of the novel coronavirus. In response to the pandemic, many people have already modified everyday activities. We’ve gone from handshakes to elbow air bumps, for instance, and have added face masks and hand sanitizer to the car’s center console that was once filled with napkins. Will some of these behaviors and actions become habitual?
“I think the pandemic has really changed how we think,” says Dr. Raj Malhotra, emergency department director for Chippenham Hospital. He notes that people are more aware of how illness spreads, how droplets may linger on doorknobs and how masks provide protection, and they will continue to take preventative measures seriously. That may well apply to greater acceptance of mask wearing in the United States post-pandemic to limit the spread of influenza. He says one of the few good outcomes of the pandemic was the substantial decline in influenza in the past flu season.
People are also more aware of how their behavior may spread germs and are less likely to, say, sneeze into their hands or blow out candles, and they are more frequently washing hands or using sanitizing gel and masks. Malhotra hopes for some long-lasting changes and that we will be a bit more accepting of appropriately wearing masks in public to limit disease spread.
“I think the changes are probably for the good,” he says.
Malhotra says that his emergency department is still seeing some COVID cases coming in, but we are medically in a much better place than a year ago, thanks to awareness and education, people taking precautionary measures, vaccinations, and better treatments.
Other changes are in the works on societal behavior because of the pandemic.
The isolation and loss that the pandemic has exacted upon the elderly may lead to a greater appreciation of seniors in society. There’s a greater awareness in younger people about how lives are linked, how people are engaged, and even though we don’t want to admit it, that we are linked to the generations that came before, says Susan Bodnar-Deren, chair of the sociology department for Virginia Commonwealth University and a medical sociologist who teaches courses including the sociology of mental health and an aging and life course.
She notes that people also are more aware of the need to treat themselves better and to be better, whether it’s through practices such as exploring emotional well-being, meditation or yoga, or being kind to ourselves and to others.
The downside is that the isolation and stress of the pandemic have led to rises in numbers of people dealing with excess drinking and substance abuse. That, too, is likely to continue post-pandemic, she fears.
Expect a continued heightened awareness of social disparities that have been spotlighted during the pandemic, particularly the greater toll COVID-19 has taken on communities of color. “We always knew about these social gradients and disparities. The pandemic kind of opened the curtain on this,” Bodnar-Deren says.
Disparities will be amplified, especially in the young. She notes how remote learning and adaptions were more easily accessed by families with parents able to work remotely and be with their children, and in more affluent schools that were able to adapt classrooms and other spaces.
The Zoom world didn’t work that well for most kids, she notes: They lost out in terms of education and in social interaction.
“It took the pandemic to kind of put this in our face,” Bodnar-Deren says. “The pandemic did bring it out in the open, and now, hopefully, we may be able to address this.”
CAPSULES
Health and medicine news in brief
The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a massive increase in opioid-related fatalities in Virginia, with a 41.2% increase in drug deaths in 2020 compared with the previous year. The report on overdose fatalities in Virginia in 2020 has been updated by the Virginia Department of Health’s office of the chief medical examiner and shows that “the largest number of fatal drug overdoses, all substances, ever seen in Virginia” occurred in the second quarter of 2020, at the initial surge of the pandemic.
The report projects 2,297 drug-related deaths in the commonwealth for 2020; there were 1,627 drug fatalities in 2019, which was a record toll, too. The report cautions that there are 75 open cases, so numbers are incomplete for 2020. Gun-related fatalities also increased last year, from 1,036 to 1,191. Driving-related fatalities rose from 947 in 2019 to 982 last year. Drug-related fatalities have been the top cause of unnatural death in the commonwealth since 2013.
