Fantastic. It's about time. There's as much resistance to this as there was to clean water, and even more evidence than there was at the time of Cholera that cleaning the air works.
Clean water used to be controversial decades ago, but is now considered essential.
Decades from now, I predict that clean air will be considered essential also.
And just as there are mandates (not recommendations) for clean water, so too do I expect that sooner or later we will have mandates for clean air. With corresponding boost to public health.
Sadly, the US Supreme Court does not agree that clean air and water are essential and they are very busy dismantling the regulatory state. We have probably reached peak clean air and water. Things will get much dirtier — and dangerous— over the coming decades.
Supreme Court simply ruled that EPA exceeded its authority given by lawmakers. Congress should give EPA more authority if its intends for the EPA to do more.
The issue we have is government agencies overreaching beyond their remit.
The first paragraph of that link basically says that the Supreme Court found the EPA exceeded its authority given by lawmakers and that Congress should give EPA more authority if its intends for the EPA to do more.
No. The SC is hostile to regulatory agency overreach as a means of congress not doing it's job. The SC is holding congress accountable. Regulatory agencies should not be able change the law through gradual expansion of scope. In this specific case, state level caps on carbon emissions are well beyond the original scope of the clean air act.
The only people who can really hold congress accountable are the voters. Right now it appears that the voters care more about who is “woke” and who isn’t, than about anything else.
That's entirely false. Case in point: the veto power. There are checks and balances built into the system. One of them is the supreme court's ability to rule on constitutionality.
And it's pretty clear that congress has pretty well abdicated its responsibilities...
> Supreme Court simply ruled that EPA exceeded its authority given by lawmakers.
The supreme court could have abolished the EPA and this statement would still be true. They simply ruled it, no politics happening here!
It is completely meaningless to discuss the supreme court without discussing the actual circumstances of the cases and the precedents set by their rulings.
Disagree? Just ask Kavanaugh w.r.t. their clean water act ruling, which of course just simply ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority:
> The majority had “rewritten the Clean Water Act” and ignored its text as well as “45 years of consistent agency practice,” Kavanaugh wrote.
> The statutory text, Kavanaugh wrote, “does not require a continuous surface connection between those wetlands and covered waters.”
> By narrowing the (Clean Water) Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
It was actually 9-0 in this particular case. All justices agreed that the Sacketts' wetland was not subject to the CWA. What is under contention (and was a 5-4 decision) is under what grounds and what test should be applied going forward:
This supreme court likely holds the opinion that Congress CANNOT delegate it's authority. IMO that's insane, but there are plenty of people who explicitly want that outcome, including the small subset of already rich and powerful people who actually benefit from a government that has to play dumb political games for every little detail of regulation instead of letting a standalone agency do it with express permission.
John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a particular water pump, the Broad Street pump.
The pump handle was temporarily removed, which stopped people from drinking the contamined water, and so reduced illness.
But once the immediate crisis had passed, the pump handle was replaced:
> After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street pump handle. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-faecal method of transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate.
It took another few years until there was agreement to build the London sewer system.
I'm probably being unfair to history, but that feels more at the feet of bacteria beliefs. That and early plumbing facing a ton of unknowns. Correct me if I'm wrong, but plumbing existed in the 1600s, but wasn't widespread and likely not studied nearly as heavily until much much later. I wouldn't be shocked to know most of what we know on it came after the 1900s.
Right, the general "open sewer" is what I would expect on early things. And even there, I'd expect everyone was in favor of "clean" water. Question is on the agreement of if things are clean or not. With bacteria being something folks didn't know about.
To be fair, I can see the analogies to the air systems. I just hesitate to think that "clean water" was a controversy.
That's exactly it - the analogy is that they couldn't see that the water was unclean, and so it was difficult to build the political will to spend money to fix an "invisible" problem.
So even though they knew the water made people ill, it didn't visually appear dirty, and so there was reluctance to clean the water.
I think where it falls, though, is that the claims were stronger for the water. People were literally getting ill and dying. With the air, there are much softer metrics being pushed that are more about seeing things are clean, but only if you have the measuring tools to see that they are dirty.
The evidence is now incontrovertible that people are "literally getting ill and dying" for diseases currently spread through the air.
So the situation is analogous: back then, it was controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the water (since many falsely thought it was already clean). Now, it is controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the air (since many falsely think that it is already clean).
Most of that evidence is for really bad air in cities, though? Akin to the open sewage river from years ago, such that I don't see much debate there.
Note, please don't take my post here as argument against having targets for ventilation. I don't intend it that way. I do think many people over state the dangers of in house stoves and such. I also have no problem saying that we have advanced enough that well ventilated house should be the default.
Stated differently. I have no problem mandating child seats. I do wish the safety comparisons for them wasn't to "someone completely unbuckled in the vehicle." So, for air, I do not argue against better codes for ventilation. I also don't expect it to have an impact on my life. My last house didn't even have forced air anything, whereas my current house does. I feel basically the same between the two. Such that all of the stories of ventilation being a miracle cure rub me very much the wrong way.
Ah - I see where we are talking at cross purposes.
I am primarily thinking of "dirty air" in the context of airborne diseases (e.g., Covid and flu).
This can be any enclosed indoor place with people and without mitigations, i.e., doesn't require wildfires or stoves.
The mitigations to clean this indoor "dirty air" can be either replacing with outdoor air, or directly "cleaning" by removing or inactivating the disease particles (e.g., with HEPA filters / UVGI).
Covid is, oddly, a specific one that has me scratching my head. I am all for increased ventilation. I have a hard time grokking any of the claims on covid.
Note that it is easy to believe most claims, except schools stand in the way. The outlandish claims that so many have held about the magic of ... well, anything, seems to fall in the face of why it didn't demolish schools. It clearly spread through the schools. Just as I have friends where it hit their family, but didn't spread to us this round. Somehow. I don't think I can credit good hygiene for my family. Certainly not the 5yo.
Again, I'm all for ventilation standards. They certainly shouldn't make things worse. By all reasoning, they should make things better. Claims against Covid/Flu, though, I take with some salt right now. I'm hopeful, but not sure I'm expecting anything there.
Amidst all the noise, my understanding of the key points is:
- We know that airborne diseases primarily spread indoors
- We know that we can clean the air, and that cleaning the air reduces disease spread
Putting the two together, I believe that cleaning the air can improve public health.
I don't expect most diseases to disappear entirely. But I do expect a dramatic reduction.
Analogy: like cholera. It hasn't disappeared entirely, but I don't personally need to think about it during my day-to-day life because the incidence rate is now so low.
Agreed that, on that logic, I hope this works. I haven't recovered from the early claims that somehow kids were not getting covid, such that I have a hard time trusting what we "know" about the spread of some of these.
This is a good example of exactly the kind of argument that would have been made against clean water 175 years ago, and which (I predict) will be unthinkable to make decades from now against clean air.
The rise of respiratory pathogens corresponds with dense cities, which are only a few thousand years old. This is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
This is different for humans than for bats, which co-evolved for millions of years with such pathogens.
If you are "for" "clean water", but only in your specific, limited interpretation of what "clean water" means with zero connection to reality, you are not in support of clean water.
My first reaction was "wow, these guys are fast". The smoke in the air in the Northeastern US has been going on for 2 days and these guys updated a federal target already?
Nope. This is an updated regulation due to Covid-19. Better to have it than not, of course, but it takes them 3 years?
Yeah this happened back in May. My guess is that they didn't want to make federal funds available on an emergency basis to retofit buildings. It's also possible this is part of the CDC being under new management.
I'm really glad that federal regulations aren't being written and published in 2 days. Now three years? I think it was early 2022 when the CDC finally changed their opinion to be that Covid-19 was transmitted via aerosolized particles, so it's about a year or so after that for this to be published? I don't think that's horrible by government standards.
It wasn't about caution. It was ignoring evidence from less-prestigious sources and sheer pig-headedness.
The disconnect was there even in the use of scientific terms. Infection-control experts have long drawn a hard line between droplet viruses and airborne ones, seeing only the latter as capable of travelling far and lingering in the air. “Dogmatic bias is certainly a big part of it,” says Don Milton, an occupational-health physician who studies aerosol transmission of infectious diseases
in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, ... The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports “opinion pieces”. Instead, they concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent”.
The cautious thing would be to encourage masking and improved ventilation.
Still, other health organizations moved faster than the WHO despite the uncertainty. In February 2020, ... At Li’s suggestion, he says, the centre recommended maximizing airflow in buildings from the outside, to help flush out any airborne contagion. At the time, Li didn’t think that ventilation would substantially reduce infection ... “I always support a precautionary approach,” he says.
Not necessarily high confidence but certainly worth exploring given the minuscule costs compared to many, many other expenses, a local school district bought classroom air filters for about $100k each and had dramatically lower COVID related absences than nearby county and city school districts that didn't have them.
$100k per classroom is significantly different from "fans". That's also an extremely privileged position, because most schools refuse to budget $20 a classroom for basic supplies like whiteboard markers.
I have no clue where the $100k per classroom number came from in the parent comment(each school maybe?), A Denver based project had an installed cost of less than $800 and a yearly energy cost of $361 per classroom.
That's still significant, but good luck convincing the school board to do that instead of continuing to funnel money wherever they usually do instead of improving classrooms.
Ventilation is required by code (International Residential Code and International Mechanical Code both lay out requirements for residential and commercial construction respectively). Any bathroom without either a window or mechanical ventilation is either legacy construction or somehow was built without regard to code e.g. unpermitted.
I'm not familiar with the history of ASHRAE but it seems like the older versions were well below a 4+ air change rate, in addition to other serious issues[1]. The the most stringent spec as of 1999 for a 1000ft2 classroom with 30 people had a required supply airflow of 450 cfm which gives you only a theoretical 2.7 ACH assuming 10ft ceilings and perfect air distribution.
The CDC targets are just a suggestion at this point but they are likely just the first step in retrofitting existing buildings.
It would be up to each AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) to adopt ASHRAE 62 into their building codes and most have not.
As far as I can tell, neither Massachusetts nor my city have incorporated ASHRAE 62 into their codes. (ASHRAE 90.1-2013 is required in MA for commercial buildings, but those relate to energy efficiency, not air quality.)
Seems that ideally, there would be a standard based on viral inactivation/removal rate, rather than targeting specifically ACH. Companies and builders could then decide what combination of filtration, ventilation, and UV deactivation they will use to achieve this rate.
Energy usage standards will soon be considered obsolete and counterproductive. They made sense before but as zero-carbon energy policies come into force, energy efficiency becomes less important. After you decouple the carbon from the energy, policies will change.
> A study last summer found that open windows in classrooms can have up to a 14.1 fold reduction in COVID19 transmission.
> Another study found that one HEPA filter is as effective as two windows partly open all day during the winter (2.5-fold decrease in transmission). Two HEPA filters are even more effective (4-fold decrease in transmission).
Note that when they say "5 ACH" they include both actual air changes and "effective air changes" due to filtration or germicidal UV:
"Some air cleaning and air treatment devices do not bring in outdoor air. Instead, they clean or treat the indoor air to reduce the concentration of infectious particles. Thus, they give eACH without the need or expense of conditioning outdoor air."
Which is fine for filtering particulates, but does nothing to resolve the issues of CO2 buildup, natural gas appliance fumes, formaldehyde from composite wood products or other off-gassing, etc. For proper indoor air quality you need both filtration and fresh air intake.
You want about 15CFM fresh air per person to address CO2, which is 14x less outdoor ventilation than 5eACH recommended interior filtering & ventilation.
Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 421 ppm. Cognition is slightly affected at 2x that, and health largely unaffected until 5x or so. I believe even the weaker climate goals are under 1.5x, so if atmospheric CO2 concentration hits 5x, we'll presumably see a lot more than a few CDC recommendations.
We recently built a new house and I decided to over provision air handlers so that we could get better control at the room level. As a result of that, there are a lot of fans moving a lot of (sound dampened!) air, through air filters. I upgraded the air filtration on each of them to something pretty close to HEPA, but not quite. I also have activated carbon added to the filters in order to reduce an odours.
Long story-- the house is comfortable, yes, but we also just don't get nearly as much transmission of viruses between the family. Of course plenty of colds get passed around with 2 adults and 3 kids, but anecdotally we just seem to be way less sick and rarely all sick at once.
My alertness level is also never an issue like I remember it being, but I have made many other lifestyle changes which could be having an impact on that.
Mostly I switched from high intensity cardio workouts (1hr+ cycling or running fast/hard) to much longer low impact workouts (walking for 3 hours+ some evenings).
The most likely reason that had a big impact was that I am not sitting on the couch and thus not snacking late at night...
I want to get something like this to get some relief from hayfever. I find my symptoms are much better when I'm at work (air conditioned office) than at home.
We added a UV light to our AC system in our < 2 year old house and went from everyone sick every couple months to rarely sick. 2 adults and > 1 children Anecdata, of course.
To join your anecdata, covid has had a huge impact on my wellness.
Since the pandemic began I have been sick once, and that was miserable (I caught covid 2 months ago).
I credit a general acceptance that if you’re sick you stay at home, and mask wearing.
It does 5 full (filtered) air exchanges with outside air per hour.
There are a further ~10 full circulations of internal air through the full filtering system.
That level of air movement remains comfortable because we have a lot of ducting (we detailed in a lot of grilles, not just one single one per room) so it is a low-velocity high throughput system. You never get a lot of air blowing out of one place, but you get a lot of placed blowing a little air.
Finally, it's too bad that more than a million Americans needed to die for this to happen but I'm glad it's finally happening. I don't have time rn to look though it, but does it discuss Co2 at all? Because sealing everyone in stale air boxes with HEPA filters is better than the stale air boxes without filters, but still not ideal.
I know there's a smoke situation going on and that filtration is the only possible solution to such smoke. However in the general case I do not want to breath filtered air in buildings, I want fresh air, straight from outside, ideally coming through the nearest window with a screen in front of it to filter the bugs and nothing more.
There are two big problems with doing this: allergies and temperature. I think both of these problems are resolved when you simply acclimatize people to outdoor air. Maybe people spend few years uncomfortable until their body gets used to it (and until people learn how to dress appropriately for the season) but in the end we'll all be healthier if we're breathing fresh air instead of stale recycled air.
I will never understand how a sizable portion of the COVID money that was printed didn’t go towards equipping every school with better filtration/air exchangers.
Not only would it have helped with that pandemic, and future ones, but would probably save more lives and productivity than any other use of money, dollar for dollar.
That wasn't very delayed at all. However, stuffing 20+ kids in a room who all bring the same thing back home to their parents/grandparents is probably the greatest way disease spreads in our culture. Offices tend to be a lot more spaced out, might have cubicles, etc.
I will never understand how a sizable portion of the COVID money that was printed didn’t proportionally go towards solving the top 10 preventable killers of people, especially obesity.
Ok I do understand why. But I will never understand why we accept corporate lobbying that distracts the government away from public interest and towards private and exclusive profits.
Companies have lobbyists. During covid, the only voices that got heard were those of companies who pushed hard to make sure they benefited. People don't have strong and coordinated advocacy groups. So all we ever talked about was making sure companies still profited, who gives a shit if people are locked inside, the economy is what's important.
Unfortunately, people are too ignorant to organize for their own good. We can't even agree on what that means, and in fact the majority would rather fight against their own interests in exchange for silly platitudes.
The economy is just as important as any other element of our civilization. In a total economic collapse, millions of people may starve to death, and millions more would live on the edge of starvation.
Energy, food, materials, and all things managed by logistics rely on economic activity.
To downplay the importance of the economy betrays little consideration to all aspects of our civilization.
"During covid, the only voices that got heard were those of companies"
So you're saying nobody heard BLM and Antifa during the "summer of love" mostly-peaceful riots?
Considering BLM got $90MM (to mostly buy mansions in two countries and employ Cullors' family), I'd say they were heard well.
And people who got extended economic benefits, not heard? huh?
And the states that got virtual blank Treasury checks to buy PPE, vents, ambulances, and everything in between...
"would rather fight against their own interests"
Who are you to tell other people what their interests are? That bit is simple arrogance. You can only ever speak for yourself.
>Who are you to tell other people what their interests are? That bit is simple arrogance. You can only ever speak for yourself.
One thing I will note is that America seems to like to do a lot of tyranny of the majority kind of moves.
Instead of saying things like "We recommend isolation and will support you through it if you choose" it becomes "You cannot leave your house because half of you said so".
or instead of "You can have an abortion but we wont pay for it" it becomes a tug of war between "You cannot have an abortion, even if you'll pay" or "You can have an abortion and we'll make the tax payer subsidize/pay for it" ...
I'm often shocked by the kind of "Freedom" that Americans accept
I mean, we already know how to prevent obesity. You just eat less.
Now there are (for now, expensive) drugs to help people do that.
The real issue is that human attention isn't great when bad things are spread out. School shootings get a lot of attention. They're scary, it's one single event, etc. Yet kids are far, far more likely to die from many other things that we could prevent.
Using the right filtration, increasing airflow, and adjusting humidity will reduce the amount of pathogens that we inhale indoors. Is that always a good thing in the long-term? If we expose ourselves to fewer viruses could we impair our immune systems and cause people to have more severe reactions when they are exposed to something new? We are also filtering bacteria, not all of which is bad.
Some exposure to 'unclean' environments can be beneficial. This is a topic discussed in books like "Dirt is Good" and is part of the Hygeine Hypothesis that states that over sanitization has negative consequences for our immune systems.
We could be trading a reduction in some illnesses, likely respiratory viruses, with increases in asthma, allergies, and other conditions especially if this were widely applied.
This is totally true, and also why we should stop sterilising water before drinking it. For balance, I propose that municipal tap water is 90% cleaned and 10% direct from dam/sewage. It's pivotally important that to increase our overall health and get sick less often, we need to get sick a lot more often.
Five air changes per hour, if you also need to heat or cool it, is unfeasible. Maybe writers misheard one air change in 5 hours? Just as they routinely confuse bits with bytes and millions with billions.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadClean water used to be controversial decades ago, but is now considered essential.
Decades from now, I predict that clean air will be considered essential also.
And just as there are mandates (not recommendations) for clean water, so too do I expect that sooner or later we will have mandates for clean air. With corresponding boost to public health.
This Supreme Court is hostile to regulations and precedent.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-supreme-court...
The rest is opinions about that finding.
And it's pretty clear that congress has pretty well abdicated its responsibilities...
The supreme court could have abolished the EPA and this statement would still be true. They simply ruled it, no politics happening here!
It is completely meaningless to discuss the supreme court without discussing the actual circumstances of the cases and the precedents set by their rulings.
Disagree? Just ask Kavanaugh w.r.t. their clean water act ruling, which of course just simply ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority:
> The majority had “rewritten the Clean Water Act” and ignored its text as well as “45 years of consistent agency practice,” Kavanaugh wrote.
> The statutory text, Kavanaugh wrote, “does not require a continuous surface connection between those wetlands and covered waters.”
> By narrowing the (Clean Water) Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/supreme-court-wetlan...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/supreme-court-curtails-cl...
John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a particular water pump, the Broad Street pump.
The pump handle was temporarily removed, which stopped people from drinking the contamined water, and so reduced illness.
But once the immediate crisis had passed, the pump handle was replaced:
> After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street pump handle. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-faecal method of transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate.
It took another few years until there was agreement to build the London sewer system.
Before then, the River Thames was essentially an open sewer.
To be fair, I can see the analogies to the air systems. I just hesitate to think that "clean water" was a controversy.
So even though they knew the water made people ill, it didn't visually appear dirty, and so there was reluctance to clean the water.
Ditto now for air.
So the situation is analogous: back then, it was controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the water (since many falsely thought it was already clean). Now, it is controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the air (since many falsely think that it is already clean).
Note, please don't take my post here as argument against having targets for ventilation. I don't intend it that way. I do think many people over state the dangers of in house stoves and such. I also have no problem saying that we have advanced enough that well ventilated house should be the default.
Stated differently. I have no problem mandating child seats. I do wish the safety comparisons for them wasn't to "someone completely unbuckled in the vehicle." So, for air, I do not argue against better codes for ventilation. I also don't expect it to have an impact on my life. My last house didn't even have forced air anything, whereas my current house does. I feel basically the same between the two. Such that all of the stories of ventilation being a miracle cure rub me very much the wrong way.
I am primarily thinking of "dirty air" in the context of airborne diseases (e.g., Covid and flu).
This can be any enclosed indoor place with people and without mitigations, i.e., doesn't require wildfires or stoves.
The mitigations to clean this indoor "dirty air" can be either replacing with outdoor air, or directly "cleaning" by removing or inactivating the disease particles (e.g., with HEPA filters / UVGI).
Note that it is easy to believe most claims, except schools stand in the way. The outlandish claims that so many have held about the magic of ... well, anything, seems to fall in the face of why it didn't demolish schools. It clearly spread through the schools. Just as I have friends where it hit their family, but didn't spread to us this round. Somehow. I don't think I can credit good hygiene for my family. Certainly not the 5yo.
Again, I'm all for ventilation standards. They certainly shouldn't make things worse. By all reasoning, they should make things better. Claims against Covid/Flu, though, I take with some salt right now. I'm hopeful, but not sure I'm expecting anything there.
Amidst all the noise, my understanding of the key points is:
- We know that airborne diseases primarily spread indoors
- We know that we can clean the air, and that cleaning the air reduces disease spread
Putting the two together, I believe that cleaning the air can improve public health.
I don't expect most diseases to disappear entirely. But I do expect a dramatic reduction.
Analogy: like cholera. It hasn't disappeared entirely, but I don't personally need to think about it during my day-to-day life because the incidence rate is now so low.
My takeaway was that evidence-free predictions should be treated differently to evidence-based predictions.
Besides, humans and our ancestors have spent millions of years exposed to all sorts of things. It is why we have an immune system.
The rise of respiratory pathogens corresponds with dense cities, which are only a few thousand years old. This is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
This is different for humans than for bats, which co-evolved for millions of years with such pathogens.
Nope. This is an updated regulation due to Covid-19. Better to have it than not, of course, but it takes them 3 years?
The disconnect was there even in the use of scientific terms. Infection-control experts have long drawn a hard line between droplet viruses and airborne ones, seeing only the latter as capable of travelling far and lingering in the air. “Dogmatic bias is certainly a big part of it,” says Don Milton, an occupational-health physician who studies aerosol transmission of infectious diseases
in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, ... The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports “opinion pieces”. Instead, they concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent”.
The cautious thing would be to encourage masking and improved ventilation.
Still, other health organizations moved faster than the WHO despite the uncertainty. In February 2020, ... At Li’s suggestion, he says, the centre recommended maximizing airflow in buildings from the outside, to help flush out any airborne contagion. At the time, Li didn’t think that ventilation would substantially reduce infection ... “I always support a precautionary approach,” he says.
https://archive.is/91nol
FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne. - WHO, March 2020 https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898
10. Should indoor temperature and humidity be used to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ventilat...
Their answer is a cop-out, but light years ahead of anyone else.
Businesses that upped their ventilation or provided outdoor seatings with plentiful airflow should have never been affected.
Sort of amazing I can still walk into a bathroom with completely stagnant air.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90671889/covid-19-spurred-invest...
Either of the models are more sophisticated than just extra fans and filters though
https://www.atlenv.com/building-ventilation-the-proper-air-c...
https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...
* https://www.ashrae.org/technical-resources/bookstore/standar...
Does this add to that?
The CDC targets are just a suggestion at this point but they are likely just the first step in retrofitting existing buildings.
[1] Ventilation Through The Years: A Perspective https://www.aivc.org/sites/default/files/airbase_12483.pdf
As far as I can tell, neither Massachusetts nor my city have incorporated ASHRAE 62 into their codes. (ASHRAE 90.1-2013 is required in MA for commercial buildings, but those relate to energy efficiency, not air quality.)
This appears in direct opposition to newer building codes to reduce energy usage.
If you do want to bring in outside air, you can use a heat exchange system to minimize the energy impact.
Some of these systems have been known to have heat exchange efficiencies as high as 70-80% while others have as low as 50%
It is subjective and anecdotal, but I am now more productive and I sleep better with a bunch of ERVs installed in my house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-power-of-...
> A study last summer found that open windows in classrooms can have up to a 14.1 fold reduction in COVID19 transmission.
> Another study found that one HEPA filter is as effective as two windows partly open all day during the winter (2.5-fold decrease in transmission). Two HEPA filters are even more effective (4-fold decrease in transmission).
Note that when they say "5 ACH" they include both actual air changes and "effective air changes" due to filtration or germicidal UV:
"Some air cleaning and air treatment devices do not bring in outdoor air. Instead, they clean or treat the indoor air to reduce the concentration of infectious particles. Thus, they give eACH without the need or expense of conditioning outdoor air."
For my small, crowded house, at least.
Long story-- the house is comfortable, yes, but we also just don't get nearly as much transmission of viruses between the family. Of course plenty of colds get passed around with 2 adults and 3 kids, but anecdotally we just seem to be way less sick and rarely all sick at once.
My alertness level is also never an issue like I remember it being, but I have made many other lifestyle changes which could be having an impact on that.
Could you share?
The most likely reason that had a big impact was that I am not sitting on the couch and thus not snacking late at night...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
I credit a general acceptance that if you’re sick you stay at home, and mask wearing.
There are a further ~10 full circulations of internal air through the full filtering system.
That level of air movement remains comfortable because we have a lot of ducting (we detailed in a lot of grilles, not just one single one per room) so it is a low-velocity high throughput system. You never get a lot of air blowing out of one place, but you get a lot of placed blowing a little air.
There are two big problems with doing this: allergies and temperature. I think both of these problems are resolved when you simply acclimatize people to outdoor air. Maybe people spend few years uncomfortable until their body gets used to it (and until people learn how to dress appropriately for the season) but in the end we'll all be healthier if we're breathing fresh air instead of stale recycled air.
Not only would it have helped with that pandemic, and future ones, but would probably save more lives and productivity than any other use of money, dollar for dollar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24039598
Ok I do understand why. But I will never understand why we accept corporate lobbying that distracts the government away from public interest and towards private and exclusive profits.
Unfortunately, people are too ignorant to organize for their own good. We can't even agree on what that means, and in fact the majority would rather fight against their own interests in exchange for silly platitudes.
Energy, food, materials, and all things managed by logistics rely on economic activity.
To downplay the importance of the economy betrays little consideration to all aspects of our civilization.
"During covid, the only voices that got heard were those of companies"
So you're saying nobody heard BLM and Antifa during the "summer of love" mostly-peaceful riots?
Considering BLM got $90MM (to mostly buy mansions in two countries and employ Cullors' family), I'd say they were heard well.
And people who got extended economic benefits, not heard? huh?
And the states that got virtual blank Treasury checks to buy PPE, vents, ambulances, and everything in between...
"would rather fight against their own interests"
Who are you to tell other people what their interests are? That bit is simple arrogance. You can only ever speak for yourself.
One thing I will note is that America seems to like to do a lot of tyranny of the majority kind of moves.
Instead of saying things like "We recommend isolation and will support you through it if you choose" it becomes "You cannot leave your house because half of you said so".
or instead of "You can have an abortion but we wont pay for it" it becomes a tug of war between "You cannot have an abortion, even if you'll pay" or "You can have an abortion and we'll make the tax payer subsidize/pay for it" ...
I'm often shocked by the kind of "Freedom" that Americans accept
Now there are (for now, expensive) drugs to help people do that.
The real issue is that human attention isn't great when bad things are spread out. School shootings get a lot of attention. They're scary, it's one single event, etc. Yet kids are far, far more likely to die from many other things that we could prevent.
For instance, in 2020 220 children under the age of 14 died due to drunk drivers: https://www.nhtsa.gov/driving-drunk-or-high-puts-everyone-da...
Some exposure to 'unclean' environments can be beneficial. This is a topic discussed in books like "Dirt is Good" and is part of the Hygeine Hypothesis that states that over sanitization has negative consequences for our immune systems.
We could be trading a reduction in some illnesses, likely respiratory viruses, with increases in asthma, allergies, and other conditions especially if this were widely applied.
What a load of shit.
The best preventive measure was not letting it leak out of your bio weapons lab.