How would news outlets then sell ad space? What else would they have to talk about on television? How would you distract away from rising inflation, higher living costs, and inadequate paying jobs?
Keeping controversy alive is a much greater tool than finding a resolution.
Proper ventilation has been a major part of every epidemic for the past 150 years, and yet no one has spoken about it…at all.
Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
211–220 of 298 posts
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#212This 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.
There have been documented cases of infections happening in seconds. Yes, longer exposure time increases infection probability, but the 15 min threshold is arbitrary, like the 2 meter social distancing. A bit like the "you can pick up food from the floor if it sat there for less than 5 seconds" meme.
The "public" in public health refers to the fact that it's the aggregate health status of a population that matters.
Arbitrary guidelines are chosen:
- Because at the population level they're likely to be effective. Yes, individuals may get sick. Or die. But with the measures in place, overall risk and impacts should be reduced.
- They're actionable, memorable, and can be monitored and observed. Masking, hand-washing, limited exposures, limited occupancy, maintaining distance --- these all help reduce transmission, they're simple guidelines most people, even young children, should be able to comply with, and they can be readily and visibly observed.
It's a balance of benefits, risks, adoption, and enforcement.
Immunity status is harder to assure and measure, but vaccination standardises the innoculation, creates a memorialisable event, and can be checked if needed at specific locations and junctures.
The "five second rule" is far less meaningful than what's on the floor. But if you happen to see something fall, note that where it landed was reasonably clean, and if possible can wash it ... you're likely to make a better assessment than if it's been sitting for a few days. Even then, I'd make a sharp distinction between five seconds on my bedroom floor, vs. in the bath, or in a public building or street.
That said, much food comes from the ground. Wash and prepare suitably, you're reasonably safe.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#213> Pumping in adequate amounts of fresh outside air, however engineered, will challenge running costs as well as carbon status. This is wrong. Mechanical Heat Recovery Ventilation (MVHR) is a well established technology which can recycle 96% of the heat from the waste air in a house. It costs about the same to fit as a central heating system. Passive houses have very high Air Changes per Hour (ACH) compared to convent…
"There is no reason not to put MVHR in normal houses" There's no reason in new normal houses, but it is very often impossible to do it sensibly in the existing housing stock. But then there is no reason houses shouldn't be built in factories, shipped to site and assembled. After all we already do that for hotels and the like. Yet that hasn't happened yet either.
I have experience with construction of many hotels in the US, and I have never heard of a hotel built in a factory here. It comes up in theory, but in practice everyone always goes with the usual construction methods.
Even the publicly listed tract home builders that put up developments of hundreds and thousands of homes in a couple years do not use factory built homes. It is safe to assume they know how to optimize for construction costs, and evidently, hiring local construction crews and subcontractors is still the best way.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
More humid air with higher specific heat capacity: I’d expect the difference to be utterly negligible. Even at 40°C, the isobaric heat capacity of saturated air is only about 5% higher than that of perfectly dry air (~1.05 J/g·K, compared to ~1), and your slightly leaky window is hardly going to be resaturating the entire room. As for the energy to dry the air, I’m inexpert in this area¹ but under the impression dehu…
> More humid air with higher specific heat capacity OK, so I should add a little more nuance: * With more water vapor in the air, the air has a little more heat capacity * With more water vapor in the air, the temperature band for comfort is a little narrower * With more water vapor in the air, air conditioners need to work extra hard to provide the same cooling. That is, the more water there is in the air to begin w…
Certainly the comfort band is the key to it. Everything else is rounding error under even the most pessimistic estimates.
On phase change energies: I don’t know enough to quantify things definitely there, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat#Specific_latent_he... looks like the right thing, and suggests around 2.4kJ/g, which with water being as much as 5% of the air (100% humidity at 40°C) would be as much as cooling the air down by about another 0.12°C for removing all of it.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#215This 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.
Viruses spread because of their hosts (us). In the past it was because of various sanitary conditions that allowed viruses to spread. Now that we have largely clean sanitation practices (showering, clean tap water, toilets), our practice of staying indoors and often in cramped places (elevators, transportation, work, school) is an easy way for a virus to chance on this way to spread.
Some patterns become more evident when viewed with the perspective of time.
There were numerous diseases that it's now clear probably had a very strong airborn-transmission component. Some we know of and their potential for transmission is extreme, e.g., smallpox. Turberculosis transmission all but certainly benefitted from cramped living, working, and travel conditions. Legionaire's disease was discovered in the 1970s, thriving in the cool, moist, air-conditioning ducts of a hotel (and affecting a convention of the American Legion, hence the name).
"Seasonal" cold and flu are also all but certaily amplified by indoor living, working, shopping, and related activities. The impact of COVID-19 countermeasures in reducing their prevalence over the past two years has been profound.
"Sick buildings" have been an issue since the 1970s (largely following increased energy-efficiency measures reducing air circulation), and there seem to be multiple components including chemicals in structural, decorative, and celaning/other materials. I predicted early into the Covid pandemic that changes to building construction, operations, and HVAC systems would likely be a lasting legacy of this pandemic.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Open windows when it's above 50F / 10C (to give a healthy safety margin to the water pipes) and tell people to wear sweaters. Yeah, please don't. There's a comfortable level somewhere above that, but at 10C I wouldn't be able to function in context of work / school. With worse circulation you just end up with your hands / feet feeling like they're constantly freezing. Some teachers thought that's a good idea, but I…
Dress appropriately for the season and you'll be just fine. If you wear warm clothes that cover your arms, your hands will be warmer too. Poor bloodflow to your hands is a consequence of your core loosing too much heat; your body compensates for that by reducing bloodflow to the extremities. Warm clothing makes gloves utterly unnecessary at 10C.
Is it possible other humans are different than you? Is it also possible the person wearing gloves at 10C was also wearing warmer clothing considering they bothered to use gloves in the first place?
I also do not think it is possible to describe what one should feel at 10C without specifying the humidity.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you live in a non tropical region?
I live in Seattle. It's 12C in my apartment right now, I have the windows open and I'm certainly not wearing any gloves. Hell, I'm not even wearing any socks. I'm wearing long pants and a thickish shirt with long sleeves, and I feel totally toasty.
West coast of North America is less humid than many other places, and hence 12C in Seattle is not 12C in the Midwest or East coast. Less humidity means less heat transfer, and so 12C in Seattle can feel like 17C in NYC. And 12C in NYC can feel like 6C in Seattle.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that I said "since the beginning".
Which is also incorrect; the US Surgeon General tweeted masks "are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" in Feb 2020, and Fauci said "There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask" in Mar 2020. Recommendations were frequently firmly against masking early on.
And the fact that that was 1) motivated by other concerns (principally: ensuring availability of then VERY scarce masks for medical personnel and first responders), 2) bad advice, and 3) backfired very badly has been public record since ... March of 2020. See Zynep Tufekci's "Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired"
Given that there is indeed a mask shortage and that medical workers absolutely do need these masks more, what should the authorities have said? The full painful truth. Despite warnings from experts for decades, especially after the near miss of SARS, we still weren’t prepared for this pandemic, and we did not ramp up domestic production when we could, and now there’s a mask shortage — and that’s disastrous because our front line health care workers deserve the best protection. Besides, if they fall ill, we will all be doomed.
If anything, a call for people who hoarded masks to donate some of them to their local medical workers would probably work better than telling people that they don’t need them or that they won’t manage to make them work. “Look, more masks would be great. We are doing our best to ramp up production. Till then, if our medical workers fall ill, we will all be worse off. Please donate any excess — maybe more than two weeks’ worth per person — to your hospital” sounds corny, but it’s the truth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
Oddly, it seems to be those who still most strongly resist wearing (or bully others for wearing) masks who seem to recall those first few weeks of ill-advised messaging.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine all those anti vaxxers' complaints about "It's being rushed out too quickly" and "It hasn't been studied yet" Listen, CNN [0] and Biden [1] changed their mind about all of that as soon as the election was over, so don’t be too hard on them. [0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/health/eua-coronavirus-vaccin... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/biden-trump-c...
As much as the flagged sibling comment looks like a flippant joke, it's true: a few weeks ago I saw a posted image of a new school textbook that, in the "recent history" section, altered the timeline to make it look like the Biden administration had a hand in creating the vaccines, rather than Trump's Operation Warp Speed.
Citation needed, imgur not accepted. "some guy saw a definitely-genuine image on the internet" is not proof of anything.
Re: Why don’t we just open the windows? Covid-19 prevention lost in translation
#220This 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.
I'm a teacher at a school. - We eat outside. - We have filters upgraded to MERV-13 and the fans run the entire school day. - We have windows and doors open on all classrooms, except for A) a few that don't open outside, or B) when it's rainy/windy to the point it's not possible. We have small, secondary HEPA filters that we run in those circumstances. (Often, we're blaring AC or heat into a room with all doors and wi…
I’m very concerned that the mask debate for elementary school (and especially pre-school) is not considering the potential long term negative effects. The anti-mask side uses false arguments about breathing too much CO2. And the pro-mask side uses irrelevant arguments about how plenty of adults wear masks all day with no harmful effects (nurses/doctors).
But we’re talking about young kids here. Pre-school (age 2 - 4) is an especially critical time and early elementary is important too. This time is a short window in brain development when the brain is super elastic and learns many things. Much of language development isn’t just hearing and speaking, it’s also seeing the mouth movements. And this is the age when the brain learns how to recognize and display facial emotions. Is it possible by masking so much these young kids, we’re doing major damage to this learning process?
Maybe the answer is yes, or maybe it’s no. But no one is even considering this question. It’s just endless stupid debates about masking that doesn’t at all consider the special circumstances of this critical time in life, this short window when so much happens.