Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

drive.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 149 posts

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#51

Post by bsenftner »

f6v wrote: post #44
colechristensen wrote: post #8

It seems overly complicated. Just raise the air exchange per person and or per volume by a significant factor and mandate a very fine particulate filter. You could do many measurements and lots of theory but nobody is going to engineer their buildings like cleanrooms anyway so the results of a lot of science wouldn’t be so good regardless.

Now, who’s gonna pay for that?

I bet it's the minimum wage workers, not receiving any bump above minimum wage, as well as the lower tier of non-minimum wage workers being reclassified to be minimum wage. You know those least able to afford it will pay for it.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#53

Post by sgerenser »

sebmellen wrote: post #10
mjevans wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more important to think about FLOW and also the quality of air exiting an air-handling system. BTW, how often are those ducts cleaned, if ever? I would personally love a well designed slightly positive pressure dwelling with particle scrubbed inflow and egress (some kind of circulated water system like industrial sites have). Get rid of that pollen and everything else please.

There's an interesting system called "Phenomenal Aire" that I recently installed. It sort of achieves what you're talking about, but uses a very different mechanism called "Cold Plasma Generation" (caused by dielectric barrier discharge). The air smells noticeably "fresher" though that might just be due to the ozone. It does seem to have a dramatic neutralizing effect on VOCs [0]. Interesting article re: use in meat…

Isn’t ozone supposed to be very detrimental to indoor air quality though?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#54

Post by dorfsmay »

Reason077 wrote: post #31
newsbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know It’s really hard for me to read a WIRED article for information. I mean I realize that’s not what it’s there for but it takes forever to get into the content of the article.

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but give it a try sometime.

When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc...

This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excitement build up" at the top of the article.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#55

Post by techdragon »

ddxxdd wrote: post #29
zargon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO and CDC have had their head in the sand for 60 years when it comes to airborne pathogens. They have only acknowledged aerosol transmission of covid in the last couple weeks. It was physicists who had to figure out why they were domatically denying reality. https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

Apparently the CDC has yet to catch up to 19th century physics. The physics of small particles moving in the air ("Brownian motion") was completely figured out by Einstein back in 1905. Given a virus' size and weight, it should be trivial for a physics graduate student to simulate how long it will be airborne.

The thing about medicine is they like to test. Theory and simulation are nice but it’s just not medicine and therefore not suitable for a doctor to tell to someone as “medical advice” with all of the legal burden of malpractice that the term entails. “What if I’m wrong?” is a question that keeps good doctors awake at night and bad doctors have forgotten to ask themselves… when this kind of question weighs on you, it’s natural human behaviour to become more cautious, to become risk averse and question the validity of newly presented information due to the potential that regardless of if their current understanding is wrong, there’s no inherent guarantee that the new information is any less wrong.

And so medicine is understandably a slow moving science, and the practice of medicine moves even slower as it represents the slow filtration of the cutting edge of medicine the science, through a complex web of human interaction. Which with a dash of “social capital” theory, makes it easy to see why we have unfortunately often ignored sound advice like this. The mistaken assumptions of people viewing a person who’s expertise bridges two disparate fields, as being unable to understand things as deeply, clearly or fully, as the people dedicated to just one of those fields.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#56

Post by auxym »

e17 wrote: post #37
Reason077 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.

I agree, and if you consider Private Eye in particular, they make the New Yorker or The Atlantic look like the Proust. Having said that, the British periodical landscape is sorely lacking a good centrist/apolitical current affairs publication in the American style.

The Economist? Or do you consider that too right leaning?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#57

Post by vishnugupta »

dorfsmay wrote: post #54
Reason077 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but give it a try sometime. When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc... This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excite…

I second this.

I applied it to this[1] super long winded article in New Yorker to get the gist of the article. This article is littered with these passages and it's super frustrating. In the end from my view point it's a shallow piece with very little new insights. FWIW the article didn't age well as India is being ravaged by the 2nd wave.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-p...

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#58

Post by londons_explore »

ddxxdd wrote: post #32
hasmanean wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a saying, earthquakes don’t kill people—buildings kill people when they collapse. In the open air on a grassland, covid won’t kill a population. The design of our hermetically sealed buildings is what’s killing us. Back in the 1970s the air outside was full of lead and smog, so the safest thing too was completely seal all office buildings. Today the air inside probably contains more hydrocarbons (from volatil…

>Of course, that flies in the face of all efforts to make things green…which involve better insulation, sealing windows against leaks, more air filtration systems and etc. If anyone has a half-hour of time to waste, you can look into the science of "countercurrent heat exchangers". It's fascinating to see how 2 pipes of air current switch temperatures when they're in contact and moving in opposite directions. So if y…

Wikipedia claims "Heat recovery systems typically recover about 60–95% of the heat in exhaust air".

But even recovering 95% of heat isn't exactly great. If you live in Canada and have a 2600 sq ft house with 8 ft ceilings and 10 changes of air per hour, and the indoors is 70F and outdoors is 0F, thats 2600810 cubic feet of air/ per hour, or 12000 BTU/hr. That means you are more than doubling your heating costs compared to sealing the building and just having conductive losses through the walls.

This is true for most climates - even the best energy recovery systems still double heating/cooling costs compared to having barely any fresh air.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#60

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

sgerenser wrote: post #53
sebmellen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting system called "Phenomenal Aire" that I recently installed. It sort of achieves what you're talking about, but uses a very different mechanism called "Cold Plasma Generation" (caused by dielectric barrier discharge). The air smells noticeably "fresher" though that might just be due to the ozone. It does seem to have a dramatic neutralizing effect on VOCs [0]. Interesting article re: use in meat…

Isn’t ozone supposed to be very detrimental to indoor air quality though?

It is. It's a strong oxidizer and damages your lungs. It makes the house smell better because it oxidizes volatile organic compounds in the air, but it's horrible for you.
Post reply on HN