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Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

economist.com

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Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#51

Post by sundvor »

toomim wrote: post #45
exabrial wrote: post #23

I suggested this as an alternative to mask enforcement months ago and was ridiculed on hacker news. I'm happy to see the idea come up again as it has a lot of solid science behind it.

Same here-- not on HN, but in real life. It seemed so obvious from the start that this was airborne and we can stop it with ventilation and masks. I actually helped start a mask distribution non-profit. But it became an uphill battle to educate people against the political warfare that happened.

Ditto for me. But rather than say it was airborne, I took the approach that the so called experts hadn't proven yet that it wasn't - so one should take precautions as if it was, until we could get more of a handle on this new domain.

I looked at it as a novel tech stack. Sure one could be an expert in twenty year old X, but if thrown into a brand new emergent tech Y, any engineer worth their salt would approach it with a certain degree of humility.

I did not see that happen at least in terms of what medical professionals the politicians and media brought to the fore early on.

We still haven't got functioning HVAC systems in all our hotel quarantine facilities in Australia... it seems insanely hard to grok, for some reason.

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#52

Post by myroon5 »

xaduha wrote: post #44

I believe Home Automation needs to start with proper climate control (not with iKettles) because just bringing fresh air from outside probably isn't enough, it depends on many things. There's so much wasted heat, varying humidity, overabundance of co2 and particulate matter due to pollution in some places - keeping it all at optimal levels throughout the year is no small task. Everyone knows about air conditioning, b…

I've been thinking the same and mainly found this so far: http://wyndflow.com/

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#53

Post by timr »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #27
exabrial wrote: post #23

I suggested this as an alternative to mask enforcement months ago and was ridiculed on hacker news. I'm happy to see the idea come up again as it has a lot of solid science behind it.

I certainly don't think you should be ridiculed for the notion, although I think my counter thought would be why should it be one or the other, and how confident are we in the engineering side of the solution at a wide scale. To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts. Th…

> To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts.

1) This isn't really true. There's not a lot of correlation between what nations/states did, and where they ended up. You can find observational papers on both sides of every question (for example, specific to masks, recently: [1]).

2) What else did nations with mask adoption do that could also explain the outcomes? Most places did many things at once, so we're going to be doing post-hoc analysis of this for years. Unfortunately, because nobody thought it appropriate to conduct actual clinical trials, we'll probably never know the answer. There are too many intermingled factors at play so we have to use models, and the modeling work so far has largely been garbage that reflects the assumptions used to create them [2].

(and before anyone says it: yes, it's entirely possible to have conducted clinical trials of masks. A cluster randomized trial, for example, could have been used to establish efficacy early in the pandemic. That we didn't even consider doing these "because it's a pandemic" is one of the biggest scientific lost opportunities of our lifetime.)

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.18.21257385v...

[2] https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(21)00087-1/fullt...

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#54

Post by actually_a_dog »

toomim wrote: post #46
actually_a_dog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still ridiculous because it's incredibly expensive compared to just wearing masks.

No it's not. Open a window and stick a fan in it. Total cost: $20. Consider that during the pandemic, the good N95 masks were not even available for any price, so people were wearing flimsy cotton things that only block 20% of particulates. Opening a window with a fan works far better if you do it right and uses materials we still had in supply.

That's not practical in most parts of the country in the winter, when the virus was at its worst. What's the cost after including increased heating and A/C usage?

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#55

Post by jlokier »

bamboozled wrote: post #49
rwallace wrote: post #9

There is a lot of low hanging fruit in this area being ignored. Here in Ireland, the pandemic is still raging and they are reopening stores – okay, that's a tradeoff on which reasonable people can disagree. But then there's no air circulating in the stores. Ventilation could be significantly improved by such a trivial measure as keeping the front door propped open, but they don't bother. Why not?

Because stores love having a perfect temperature to attract customers ?

At the moment, the closed doors are definitely repelling some customers.

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#56

Post by actually_a_dog »

jiofih wrote: post #33
actually_a_dog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still ridiculous because it's incredibly expensive compared to just wearing masks.

Curious to know how to wear a mask while eating.

You take your food and go eat at home, like we actually did.

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#57

Post by [deleted] »

SllX wrote: post #6

> The who therefore played down the risks of aerosols, issuing guidance via its Twitter and Facebook pages at the end of March 2020 that the general public need not worry. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, adding that any claims to the contrary were “misinformation”. Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing. This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy…

[deleted]

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#58

Post by BurningFrog »

SllX wrote: post #6

> The who therefore played down the risks of aerosols, issuing guidance via its Twitter and Facebook pages at the end of March 2020 that the general public need not worry. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, adding that any claims to the contrary were “misinformation”. Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing. This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy…

It's important to understand that what CDC & FDA etc say is not "science".

These are federal regulatory agencies whose mission is to enforce regulations. This is part of a political process, and their leaders ultimately serve at the pleasure of the president.

When the prominent scientists who work there speak on issues, they are speaking as employees of that organization, not giving their best scientific estimation.

The WHO is a UN agency that's probably even more politicized, but I don't know much about it.

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#59

Post by SamBam »

toomim wrote: post #46
actually_a_dog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still ridiculous because it's incredibly expensive compared to just wearing masks.

No it's not. Open a window and stick a fan in it. Total cost: $20. Consider that during the pandemic, the good N95 masks were not even available for any price, so people were wearing flimsy cotton things that only block 20% of particulates. Opening a window with a fan works far better if you do it right and uses materials we still had in supply.

Typical "this is the obvious solution" thinking without stopping to think about why it doesn't work like that in the majority of situations.

Most office buildings are giant rectangular blobs. The vast majority of people are not near a window. Most skyscrapers don't even have windows that can be opened.

Most manufacturing, processing, distribution jobs etc are in large warehouses. No windows near anybody. Same with a huge number of other blue-collar jobs like groceries and retail.

Even in buildings where windows can be opened, you're throwing potentially thousands of dollars worth of heating out the window half the year, and thousands of dollars in cooling the other half.

So don't just look around your own room, see the window, and say "hey, there's an obvious $20 solution to this, why didn't all these ventilation experts ask me?"

Re: Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

#60

Post by perryizgr8 »

harikb wrote: post #30
christophilus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while, YouTube and friends were banning people who pointed out the WHO was wrong. So, probably quite a few people.

that was specifically about calling Covid a hoax. Those who were fighting against this censorship weren’t fighting for Covid being airborne or not

Well they were also censoring videos speculating about the lab leak theory. So they were definitely treating any discussion about covid that diverged from what who/cdc were saying as misinformation.
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