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A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

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Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#111

Post by taxicabjesus »

svantana wrote: post #69
techdragon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

I can see your point, but isn't the WHO tweeting “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” an example of the opposite? They made a hard assertion without any clear proof to back it up.

Hmm? interesting. Here's the offending tweet:

  FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne. 
  
  The #coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets
  generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or 
  speaks.

  To protect yourself:
  -keep 1m distance from others
  -disinfect surfaces frequently
  -wash/rub your hands
  -avoid touching your Eyes Nose Mouth
- https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898

The WHO gave a lot of bad advice. Some say that it was intentionally misleading. Promoting ventilation as a reasonable treatment for the initial stages of covid-19 was the worst possible advice to give front-line medical practitioners who didn't know what they were dealing with.

We now know that the fecal-aerosol route of transmission is very important. Forbes has a recent piece about the fecal-oral/aerosol route: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/03/22/pre... Another tweet by ... someone was about how the masks effectively aerosolize droplets.

Keeping bathrooms open but requiring face coverings was an exercise in futility.

In the case of COVID-19, the WHO seems to have implemented #PrasadsLaw [0]. "Prasad’s Law: Medical goods and services that concentrate wealth can be paid for; medical goods and services that disperse wealth are “unaffordable.”"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728864

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#112

Post by [deleted] »

renaudg wrote: post #88
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...

Here's a fascinating Twitter thread about the history of aerosol transmission denial, going back to the early 20th century : https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708?s... It's 100 tweets long, may be more readable here : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html

[deleted]

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#113

Post by a9h74j »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #7

From the article: "It is not known exactly what fraction of infections could be prevented if all building and transport ventilation systems on the planet were ideal (in terms of controlling airborne infections), or the cost of design and retrofitting to make them ideal." I think this is the key question. Surely better ventilation would have prevented some infections in the covid pandemic. But how many? And to decide…

I would put money on COVID not happening at all if all buildings had 10 air refreshes per hour, and that air either coming from the outdoors or going through a HEPA filter. I would guess an analysis of workplace COVID rates would see a strong correlation between workplaces with and without filtration in their AC systems.

People talk all the time about air changes per hour. Even a recent Nature.com article only discussed this metric. However, if you look at suppliers of heat recovery ventilation units, a different metric is liters/sec/person. About 10 liter/sec/person seems to be pretty good for commercial spaces. For home environments people can adapt to smells a little better, so the requirements can be lower.

Also: heat recovery percentages don't always include the energy required for forced air movement through the exchanger.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#114

Post by [deleted] »

newsbinator wrote: post #19
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...

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#115

Post by Angostura »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
pbronez wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader com…

Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of…

Its 'pyramid structure', not inverted. It was used in newspapers for two reasons.

The first is because, yes it allows busy readers to access the most salient facts first. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly from the point of print newspaper production, it allowed subs to always cut from the bottom, without having to read the whole piece carefully...

Newspapers would go through several editions throughout the night as new stories came in or existing stories were expanded. What started life as a front page lead might find itself moved to page three and progressively shortened, possibly down to a 1 sentence news-in-brief NIB.

The pyramid style let subs always fit a story into the available space, simply by cutting everything progressively from the bottom.

This story in Wired is not a news story and is not written as a news story. It is a feature story and its construction follows different rules.

It's a very good feature story, in my opinion.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#116

Post by x3iv130f »

sjg007 wrote: post #110
londons_explore wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would put money on COVID not happening at all if all buildings had 10 air refreshes per hour, and that air either coming from the outdoors or going through a HEPA filter. I would guess an analysis of workplace COVID rates would see a strong correlation between workplaces with and without filtration in their AC systems.

Well the spanish flu happened and they did not have HVACs back then and all the windows leaked.

Spanish Flu is a really bad name for this disease.

From what we know it started in Kansas. It should be called 1918 Flu Pandemic.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#117

Post by Angostura »

rcoveson wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of…

> Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"... Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me. An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing. I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.

Yeh, it's simply called pyramid structure.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#118

Post by Angostura »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #108
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.

> Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct. Here's a counterexample literary trainwreck from the BBC. Have a go at wading through this horror show. It appears to have been written deliberately to withhold the topic of the article from the reader, for as long as possible. The wholly uninformative title is just the beginning. Those with the necessary patience will eventually realise th…

Again, this is a feature story, not a news story.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#119

Post by newsbinator »

0xffff2 wrote: post #106
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.

I refuse to click on Wired links anymore. The signal to noise ratio is way to low to ever be worth it.

Could someone here please make a Wired auto-summarizer that cuts out the stuff about what the subject of the article had for breakfast that day and retains the insights?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#120

Post by Izkata »

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.

Per that Wired article, it was intentionally ignored when the first virus-related research came up in the 1940s because it was too close to the discredited miasma theory.

> Given a virus' size and weight, it should be trivial for a physics graduate student to simulate how long it will be airborne.

This is also in the article, known research from decades ago. Social distancing is in fact based on a misunderstanding and conflation of a few things in that early research.

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