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

Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

bmj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 298 posts

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#21

Post by _delirium »

anonporridge wrote: post #10
nicoburns wrote: post #4

This agrees with my intuitive impression of everything I've read on Covid-19: that the primary transmission vector is through the being in unventilated or poorly ventilated enclosed spaces with an infected person for ~15 minutes or longer. I definitely feel like neither governmental policies or people's individual precautions and behaviours quite reflect that reality.

A potentially fantastic outcome from all this is that many more public and private spaces will be designed and retrofitted with very good ventilation. Beyond curbing the spread of natural airborne diseases, it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare. And even beyond all that, we're becoming increasingly aware of how important clean air is for our overall health even wit…

I hope that's true. My experience so far has been pretty minor symbolic changes though. My employer sent emails about how they swapped their MERV filters for slightly better ones, and something hand-wavy about adjusting the external air percentage "when feasible" (with no numbers). I would be surprised if they do major retrofits, like a new heat exchange system allowing significantly higher percentage of outside air, at least as things currently stand.

I could see it happening in new buildings, though. Possibly in existing buildings if an easy-to-read summary number for ventilation became popular and the numbers for specific spaces became easy to find and widely publicized. Then companies might be willing to pay more to rent space with a higher "ventilation score", especially if employees balked at working in spaces with low scores.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#22

Post by oleganza »

anonporridge wrote: post #10
nicoburns wrote: post #4

This agrees with my intuitive impression of everything I've read on Covid-19: that the primary transmission vector is through the being in unventilated or poorly ventilated enclosed spaces with an infected person for ~15 minutes or longer. I definitely feel like neither governmental policies or people's individual precautions and behaviours quite reflect that reality.

A potentially fantastic outcome from all this is that many more public and private spaces will be designed and retrofitted with very good ventilation. Beyond curbing the spread of natural airborne diseases, it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare. And even beyond all that, we're becoming increasingly aware of how important clean air is for our overall health even wit…

Bio-terrorism you expected: some evildoers throwing dirt into the vents

Bio-terrorism you actually got: governments using every flu season as an excuse to turn surveillance, police and paperwork up to 11 and push citizens into a neverending civil war of two hysterical camps.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#23

Post by fennecfoxen »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #12

To this day, there is no mandate whatsoever in any public transport to keep windows open. NiH? CDC? Missing in action thanks a lot. Uber could simply ask customers to always ask for windows down. This to me is the biggest unsung crime of the pandemic by govt officials and private industry alike.

Uber and Lyft in fact require customers to agree to keep windows open “when possible” in the same pop up as reminding them to wear masks. Short of intrusive integrations with some hypothetical car window status sensors, not presently deployed in the fleet, that’s getting close to the limits of what can be effectively achieved for now.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#24

Post by adventured »

KevinEldon wrote: post #6
coding123 wrote: post #3

> The world is finally coming to terms with the realization that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is airborne It's funny. The world is definitely a place we are willing to let 5 million people die. But we are definitely not allowed to have a single study where we have 1 definitely infected person stand in an air sealed room for 1 hour 6 feet away with someone not infected. Don't get me wrong, I have been wearing a blue 3M…

You’re volunteering?

It's trivial to get volunteers. I'll volunteer. In the US we're around SARS2 spreaders all the time. Every time you spend ~30 minutes walking around in a major retail store chain you're highly likely to be exposed to SARS2. Now do that N times per week like most Americans have been for the past year plus. What am I supposed to be afraid of compared to that?

I've had Covid; early into the pandemic. It was quite unpleasant. I'll take my chances at another round with it, especially if the science is quite useful and the experiment is reasonable.

There is enormous cowardice in the governmental sphere in much of the world today. Otherwise we would have immediately began pursuing challenge trials with the mRNA vaccines, which took a mere few days to create. It would have been trivial to get thousands of volunteers to rapidly begin testing the vaccines and it would have been trivial to work with the government to stage a large physical space to do so (the army could have provided a significant, isolated location easily), at whatever cost in money and resources were necessary.

In the meantime, instead, we probably had well over 100,000 people die just in the US that didn't need to, versus had we accelerated the vaccine testing and deployment. Older people have a high vaccination rate in the US, fortunately; we could have gotten vaccines to them sooner. A generation or two prior, we would have used challenge trials to move faster.

But then this is the same country that barely shrugs when 100,000 people die in a single year from overdoses. Of course that same cowardly country isn't going to do challenge trials.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#25

Post by delecti »

nicoburns wrote: post #4

This agrees with my intuitive impression of everything I've read on Covid-19: that the primary transmission vector is through the being in unventilated or poorly ventilated enclosed spaces with an infected person for ~15 minutes or longer. I definitely feel like neither governmental policies or people's individual precautions and behaviours quite reflect that reality.

For better or worse, the medical community is usually hesitant to recommend things before studies have been done, and some "common sense" advice is difficult to test.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#26

Post by bb123 »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20
bb123 wrote: post #13

Good ventilation is easy to do in the summer months, but it is winter in the northern hemisphere at the moment, and fuel prices are at all time highs. That means adequate ventilation is likely an expensive thing to achieve. Not to mention the environmental consequences of extra energy consumption, along with the plastic pollution from littered masks and lateral flow tests - they’re absolutely everywhere.

I'm sorry but this is unacceptable. We have shut down entire industries, made some people 2nd class citizens, and wrote blank checks to healthcare companies to solve this problem, and your concern is lost heat and the environment ? Any common sense government would have mandated open windows a long time ago, in most transportation systems and in federal buildings that could bear it, instead we wasted valuable time wi…

I’m not sure what there is to accept? I never said it wasn’t worth it, just that there are financial and environmental costs to consider. Where I live heating a building is expensive and many people can not afford to do it adequately at the best of times.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#27

Post by WithinReason »

delecti wrote: post #25
nicoburns wrote: post #4

This agrees with my intuitive impression of everything I've read on Covid-19: that the primary transmission vector is through the being in unventilated or poorly ventilated enclosed spaces with an infected person for ~15 minutes or longer. I definitely feel like neither governmental policies or people's individual precautions and behaviours quite reflect that reality.

For better or worse, the medical community is usually hesitant to recommend things before studies have been done, and some "common sense" advice is difficult to test.

Masks have been recommended heavily since the beginning without good evidence that they are effective. [0]

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v...

CONCLUSIONS Most included trials had poor design, reporting and sparse events. There was insufficient evidence to provide a recommendation on the use of facial barriers without other measures. We found insufficient evidence for a difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators and limited evidence to support effectiveness of quarantine. Based on observational evidence from the previous SARS epidemic included in the previous version of our Cochrane review we recommend the use of masks combined with other measures.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#28

Post by 323 »

Ventilation is energetically expensive, and can be even impossible to retrofit (windows that don't open, ...)

Purification however is energetically very cheap (just a fan blowing through a filter, maybe with a UV led, no temperature change). And has the bonus benefit of removing other dangerous particulate stuff from the air (dust, smoke, ...)

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#29

Post by oleganza »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20
bb123 wrote: post #13

Good ventilation is easy to do in the summer months, but it is winter in the northern hemisphere at the moment, and fuel prices are at all time highs. That means adequate ventilation is likely an expensive thing to achieve. Not to mention the environmental consequences of extra energy consumption, along with the plastic pollution from littered masks and lateral flow tests - they’re absolutely everywhere.

I'm sorry but this is unacceptable. We have shut down entire industries, made some people 2nd class citizens, and wrote blank checks to healthcare companies to solve this problem, and your concern is lost heat and the environment ? Any common sense government would have mandated open windows a long time ago, in most transportation systems and in federal buildings that could bear it, instead we wasted valuable time wi…

No, you shut down entire industries not because of poor vents in a concert, but because some overly powerful, yet replaceable and hysterical bureaucrats decided to cover their asses (from being eaten by the exact same bureaucrats) with arbitrary loud and visible policies that had little correlation with actually solving any problems.

Notice similarity between places like Florida (less power-hungry governments + freedom-loving population) and places like Belarus and Russia (more authoritarian central gov that does not fear for losing its seat in the next election): both were shutting down things to a much lesser degree than everyone else. I think the reason is exactly the combo of "I can have arbitrary power as long as I have good PR" in the average democratic political environment.

Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation

#30

Post by amelius »

oleganza wrote: post #22
anonporridge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A potentially fantastic outcome from all this is that many more public and private spaces will be designed and retrofitted with very good ventilation. Beyond curbing the spread of natural airborne diseases, it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare. And even beyond all that, we're becoming increasingly aware of how important clean air is for our overall health even wit…

Bio-terrorism you expected: some evildoers throwing dirt into the vents Bio-terrorism you actually got: governments using every flu season as an excuse to turn surveillance, police and paperwork up to 11 and push citizens into a neverending civil war of two hysterical camps.

Only one camp is hysterical.
Post reply on HN