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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

#81

Post by wffurr »

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.

Writers with frustrated literary ambitions...

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#82

Post by tengbretson »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #23
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.

Hear hear. Maybe Wired should talk about the coffee she's sipping, made from beans harvested on the south coast of Java, where there is a legend of a queen who drowned...

The important thing was that she had an onion on her belt, which was the style at the time.

Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#83

Post by hobs »

jerf wrote: post #79
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…

"this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written." I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article". Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might ma…

Sure, but most of the content they are writing is neither entertaining or engaging, its long and wandering and I couldn't care less.

No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time.

It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#84

Post by CoastalCoder »

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 agree. Changing the building codes' ventilation requirements will cost time and money. And the resulting designs are potentially louder, bulkier, and less energy-efficient.

Hopefully we'll make those changes if and only if doing so brings significant health benefits.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#85

Post by falseprofit »

ur-whale wrote: post #48
f6v wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still eat fresh fruits and vegetables, touch the surfaces on your way to work etc. There’re countless pathogens everywhere. So I guess we would be fine? You’re right that our immune system didn’t evolve to be in a sterile environment. But we also weren’t meant to be that close to that many humans.

>So I guess we would be fine? Can you catch airborne respiratory diseases from eating fruit? What I'm saying is: we run the risk of never being able to go outside again if we eliminate all airborne pathogens.

Are you suggesting that bringing more air from outdoors into our indoors environments will cause us to lose our ability to tolerate outdoors air?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#86

Post by goldenkey »

Joker_vD wrote: post #80
daniellarusso wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Ben Franklin / John Adams debate when they shared a small room together overnight with one window. “When Adams explained that he didn’t want to catch an illness from the cold night air, Franklin countered that the air in their room was even worse.” https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/54169/time-ben-franklin-...

Miasma theory rears its ugly head once again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory#Contagionism_ver... The night air is dangerous, close those windows before you go to sleep!

Miasma was a perfectly good theory and if anything, is obviously true innately. Bad smelling air from urine, shit, festering corpses and the like, was often laden with viruses, bacteria, and noxious chemical fumes. Sure, plenty of diseases are not airborne but air that smells like shit isn't exactly a boon to be inhaling. There is a non zero chance of getting sick from noxious air.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#87

Post by goldenkey »

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's an extremely strong oxidizer. It will poke holes in your lungs. But sure, it'll also oxidize the other crap in your air.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#88

Post by renaudg »

zargon wrote: post #9
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…

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

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#89

Post by malandrew »

auxym wrote: post #56
e17 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Economist hasn’t been right leaning for at least half a decade or longer now.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#90

Post by renaudg »

Here's a fascinating Twitter thread about the history of aerosol transmission denial in the medical community, going back to the early 20th century :

https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708?s... (It's 100 tweets long, here's a more readable version : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html)

The tl;dr is that 20th century health authorities went too far in their rejection of the 19th century "miasma" theory of disease transmission, and now the pendulum is swinging back again.

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