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Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/e4057 https://archive.is/e4057
  • leptoniscool 5y ago
    thank you for this!
• exabrial 5y ago
  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.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    It's still ridiculous because it's incredibly expensive compared to just wearing masks.
    • jiofih 5y ago
      Curious to know how to wear a mask while eating.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        You take your food and go eat at home, like we actually did.
        • jiofih 5y ago
          Uh, this is about ventilation in internal spaces. Like restaurants. Where you eat inside. Your comment is completely out of context.
          • actually_a_dog 5y ago
            No, you were just trolling. The answer is you don't do that.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • bluGill 5y ago
      On the other hand, once a building is done right you don't have to worry about it again (other than replacing filters and the like on schedule), while masks are too easy to wear wrong, lose, or take off (particularly when eating)
    • toomim 5y ago
      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.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        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?
        • Natsu 5y ago
          Your comment just made me wonder if that's part of why the viruses are always worst in winter. Sure, there are likely other factors, like vitamin D, but...
          • bluGill 5y ago
            Seems unlikely. If you had made your comment in 1950 when the idea of air conditioning in summer was unheard of you would have a point. However these days any house or building has cooling in summer. People are outside a bit more in summer, but not enough to make a difference.
            • Natsu 5y ago
              I was thinking of the winter, actually, when people are more often indoors and not likely to leave doors or windows open.
      • SamBam 5y ago
        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?"
  • kardos 5y ago
    Retrofitting the world's buildings for better ventilation all at the same time during a pandemic? Seems like a project measured in decades
    • bootlooped 5y ago
      I have almost never even seen a business' window or door propped open where it was normally closed before. I have never seen an air purifier in a public area of a business. If HVAC systems were modified or upgraded, I wouldn't have any way of knowing that, but I bet not many were. A lot of businesses won't do things for their patrons' safety unless they're forced to. Could you imagine what fire safety would be like if there were no laws or regulations about it?
      • bluGill 5y ago
        I find it strange governors didn't tell bar/srestaurants that if they had mitigation in place they could remain open. Lockdowns hurt those the most, and good ventilation/filtration would be cheap and easy. It would probably make enough of a difference as to be worth it.
  • kevin_nisbet 5y ago
    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. The building ventilation side to me seems more like a long term solution, with lots of details to implement. How can we be confident that someone did the retrofit correctly, and tested the air pathways to make sure there isn't droplets being pushed from one table to another in a restaurant. Can we be confident that small changes to dampers, rearrangement of the dining room, other changes don't affect the conditions and are maintained over time. Building HVAC systems are hard enough to maintain as is. This seems like a great addition to building codes, or if some standard can be developed for inspection, maintenance, testing, etc. And how can we be sure that businesses don't just try and cheat, would they be liable, can this be inspected, would the liability be collectable, etc, etc. I think as a society we should be looking at this problem holistically, I think part of the solution is masks, and part is vaccines, and part should probably be building codes and HVAC systems in public indoor spaces to reduce a variety of airborne pathogens.
    • bsder 5y ago
      > And how can we be sure that businesses don't just try and cheat As someone who knows an HVAC inspector, they WILL cheat. He has appalling stories. The most appalling was him having to hold up opening a memory care facility because the HVAC was all shared when it was all supposed to be isolated. This was completely on the HVAC contractor as the plans were quite explicit about what needed to be done--which means that contractor did this before and got away with it. People who come into these kinds of facilities are not well, and get sick with things all the time. Many of them are immune compromised. But, nope, everybody wanted the facility open and banking money--this included the local politicians, the local community, the "oversight" committee, etc.--nobody gave a damn about the fact that the HVAC would KILL PEOPLE. So, don't hold your breath.
      • dwaite 5y ago
  • toomim 5y ago
    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.
    • sundvor 5y ago
      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.
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    It's not either/or. "Opening a window", some places don't even have a window to open.
  • R0b0t1 5y ago
    This shouldn't be seen as a replacement for masks but as a realization that viruses easily form infectious particles. The initial response was insanity and driven largely by hospital's desire to avoid expensive PPE use.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    February 2020 when I first heard this line it contradicted all the "experts" that I should be able to trust on a topic that as someone not trained in biology I need trust worthy experts. By now it has become clear that those experts were using their position of authority to say things that were not true instead of admitting they didn't know. Once a few experts broke and started saying the truth that others still haven't really embraced changing science is a reflection on those experts that is morally criminal (probably not legally)
• Natsu 5y ago
  I've been reading stuff like this for some time now, I actually had our ventilation redone, albeit for non-Covid reasons because we had too much dust due to leaky vents causing asthma issues and it makes things a lot better even without worrying about Covid. I never could find any easy/good way to add UV to the mix without having to redo everything again, though. I wonder if anyone knows any easy/simple add-ons like the one we got to add a bidet to the toilet to deal with the TP shortages.
  • laurent92 5y ago
    I’ve bought the Coway AP-1512AH which filters air, and is extremely silent, and I have a separate CO2-PM10-PM2.5 measurer. It does wonders against asthma. PMs go from 25microgram/m3 to 1 in half an hour, which I trust because the measurement tool is separate. I never succeeded to have less than 10 before the Coway. Before that, I would sneeze first thing in the morning, then sneeze by rows of 10 times in Spring, 30 times a day, nose bleeding from too much sneezing. I would also have an irritated bronchitis which gave me slight asthma (but enough to make me abandon intensive sports). Now I still have risk of asthma, but at least when I want relief, I close the windows, switch on the Coway, and breathe fresh air. I live in a city center of average density. However, CO2 fills up quickly. I wish I could find some portable air exchanger: Taking air from outside, exchanging temperature, and filtering. I’ve lodged a bit for a house which has that, I’m hoping I’m selected.
    • josephst18 5y ago
      I would love to find a portable air exchanger too—opening windows helps with CO2 levels but it’s inefficient for most of the year in much of the United States. Built-in air exchangers with heat recovery are available but are a non-starter for anyone in a rented place. Unfortunately, no good solution exists so far
      • jeffbee 5y ago
        The good solution is to simply tax landlords to get decent ventilation installed.
• akkawwakka 5y ago
  Easy to scoff at an obvious headline, but SARS-CoV-2 may very well be endemic now. Going forward pandemic preparedness will no longer be reserved for the Fortune 5s or 50s. New construction for a while at least will hopefully consider biosecurity and pandemic preparedness as concrete a threat as natural disasters.
  • ketamine__ 5y ago
    Hopefully the labs doing gain of function research in the US will increase their bio security levels as well. https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/the-next-pandemic-could-start-in-a-lab-rutgers-scientist https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/the-next-pandemic-coul...
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      I wonder how many countries and ideological groups have the ability to do GoF research. The US and China obviously do. I'm assuming all of the G7 plus Russia do. Maybe India too? The problem is that the pandemic has shown just how impactful this type of research can be and what it can create. Most countries don't want to create bioweapons that are going to have blowback on them but ideological groups within those countries may very well be willing to accept losing some members in exchange for bringing the current world order to a halt. Security, both physical and social, will indeed need a healthy increase.
• SllX 5y ago
  > 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 kind that has you making land wars in Asia or creating command economies and seizing private property; but the bureaucratic "we know better than you because we said so" kind. When authority is invested in you, as it has been invested in the WHO, and you abuse that authority to tell independent investigators not on your payroll that they are just flat out wrong and the lines of inquiry they are investigating are dead ends and they should just shut up already, well, maybe you shouldn't have the authority you were vested with. Fortunately, we also live in a world where the UN and its agencies do not have a monopoly on good information.
  • kiba 5y ago
    Yes, health authorities can be wrong, but if you want to prevent, stop, or aliemoriate a pandemic, you need cooperation. You can't just have Joe Sixpack decided to not quarantine himself or not wear masks. Yes, the authority figures can be wrong. Fauci can be wrong. People can die when health authorities make mistakes, whether through indecision or decision. I myself keep wearing masks after the CDC says I don't need to. I suspect historians are going to analyze the pandemic and list a litany of mistakes health authorities made in trying to stop the pandemic. At the end of the day, who are you going to trust more? That schmuck in a random youtube video, or the doctors that run the CDC?
    • mixedCase 5y ago
      I don't know, who purposefully lied to the people treating it like sheep to be shepherded with confident lies and half-truths? These organizations have burned through a tremendous amount of credibility by virtue of not being honest about what they did and didn't know. And Joe Sixpack, on the other hand, gained a lot. What are they going to be able to do when he starts using that to peddle dangerous products or make even worse recommendations but now with so much more influence? There's no fastest way to erode the usefulness of a government than making negligent use of its credibility.
• rwallace 5y ago
  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?
  • bamboozled 5y ago
    Because stores love having a perfect temperature to attract customers ?
    • jlokier 5y ago
      At the moment, the closed doors are definitely repelling some customers.
  • jansan 5y ago
    With a current average of 3 deaths per day in Ireland, how can you call the pandemic "raging"?
    • switch007 5y ago
      The media has moved on to cases and variants to scare people now. Didn’t you get the memo? ;)
  • diarmuidc 5y ago
    It's not even remotely raging
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• deeblering4 5y ago
  Well it’s nice to think driving school buses with the windows down this past winter may have significantly helped to avoid transmissions between households.
• xaduha 5y ago
  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, but barely anyone knows about recuperators/heat exchangers or has an air quality monitor in their house or at work. If you don't have proper ventilation then most of those air conditioners just recirculate stale air, change its temperature and mess with humidity.
  • myroon5 5y ago
    I've been thinking the same and mainly found this so far: http://wyndflow.com/ http://wyndflow.com/
    • xaduha 5y ago
      There are some DIY recuperator videos on youtube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=diy+recuperator https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=diy+recuperator
  • m_mueller 5y ago
    Totally agreed. Smart homes seem to lack focus in that area - this seems to be by far the lowest hanging fruit in terms of improving quality of life / health, that smart homes could tackle. Central heating & air, heat exchangers, good isolation, sensors in every room for CO2, humidity, temperature, pollution and maybe O2. A small LCD per room with some warning & error lights (and otherwise no background lighting) if anything goes outside set parameters. In countries like the US where smoke detectors are already mandatory, maybe they could just be replaced with a new generation that offers these capabilities.
  • fy20 5y ago
    In Northern Europe and (slightly slower) parts of North America heat recovery ventilators are becoming standard on new buildings. In my country all new homes need to come with a unit that is at least 90% efficient. Retrofitting such systems isn't that hard, especially if you already have ducted AC. If you don't there are units that can ventilate a single room, they just need a 15cm hole in the wall. You mention home automation, but it's actually interesting with newer houses that are built smarter, there is less to automate: - The ventilation system needs to be sized for the house, then it can be left running all the time (you could turn it off or down when nobody is home, but these systems often consume under 100W of electricity - it's just two fans). - With low temperature hydronic underfloor heating in a concrete floor, it takes so long for the system to heat up or cool down that turning it off when nobody is home will barely affect the temperature. If the system is balanced correctly, taking into account how much energy from the sun each room receives, you can do without individual temperature controllers in each room. Once it's setup the only adjustment needed is to turn it on in the autumn and off in the spring.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mherdeg 5y ago
  My town's school system is all in on healthy buildings -- they got parent MD/PhDs to read the literature and invite outside experts to advise, then they set minimum air change per hour and minimum filtration criteria (something like, classrooms may reopen iff they have 5 air changes per hour with outdoor or MERV 13+ filtered air). They did a bunch of HVAC work to support this goal and have reopened okay. The town's other public buildings as far as I can have ignored this and I think the libraries are just gonna reopen and hope for the best. Advocates of healthy buildings have been telling us about the risks of low airflow (focusing mostly on cognitive effects of high CO2 vs the disease impacts). It sucks but the pandemic is their once in a generation opportunity to push change in indoor air quality -- I hope some of it sticks.
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    Agree You don't need the WHO or some higher authority to tell you opening windows or circulating more air during a pandemic is a good idea.
    • LeCow 5y ago
      Or you know, winter. As has been the case for at least the past few hundred thousand years.
  • trhway 5y ago
    > the pandemic is their once in a generation opportunity to push change in indoor air quality in the recent years many offices, especially new and deeply remodeled got "green" certified, and decreased ventilation flow has been among the ways to achieve the energy saving for the certification. I don't hope they would turn the ventilation/AC back on to good levels - instead i think there would spring a cottage industry of "virus filters" to be installed on top of those "green" systems. Additionally these new/remodeled offices have those hip open ceilings with no noise blocking what classic office ceiling provided - as a result any meaningful flow increase causes very uncomfortable low frequency noise from those uncovered ventilation ducts.
    • 5y ago
• bryanwb 5y ago
  Covid's over bro. We now have herd immunity in North America. Even a top doc at Johns Hopkins says so https://www.wsj.com/articles/herd-immunity-is-near-despite-faucis-denial-11616624554 https://www.wsj.com/articles/herd-immunity-is-near-despite-f... Cases are crashing in in Latin America and South Asia. The only place where it may still rise in big numbers are the prison islands in Oceania. There are better ways to spend our resources than on redoing the world's HVAC, like maybe, y'know, climate change.
  • yosito 5y ago
    > Covid's over bro. You may be right, but it didn't end on it's own. > There are better ways to spend our resources than on redoing the world's HVAC Before we had vaccines, ventilation improvements likely prevented a significant amount of transmission. If ventilation can reduce the transmission of other illnesses, and prevent the next COVID, it's pretty hard to argue that it's a bad use of resources. > climate change Yes, that's important. But it's not a zero sum game where investing in public health somehow takes away from investing in environmentally friendly technology.
  • rscho 5y ago
    Yes, yes... let's see what happens next winter.
• yosito 5y ago
  I find it odd that it's still news that improved ventilation helps prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission. I've been reading articles and studies that point this out since at least April 2020. This is not news. Yet it seems that a significant portion of people are still not informed about it.
  • bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Yeah, it's incredible how useless governments still are (this is criticizing them from the point of view of they need to do more, not from the doubter's point of view "that it's just a flu"), they're still just blabbing on about 6 feet distancing and handwashing despite all the new (and old!) facts.
• floatingatoll 5y ago
  No government I’m aware of has yet committing to fund renovation of every indoor business in their country. Nothing smaller than a government is prepared for the renovation cost of retrofitting every single business in the world for disease-preventing air exchange standards. If I were a small business owner, I wouldn’t want to simultaneously scare or anger customers, especially if there’s nothing I can do to afford massive HVAC renovation to a building I probably don’t even own. I would earn the fear of patrons and the ire of other tenants, and might end up evicted by my landlord for junk reasons like epidemic fear-mongering or wasting heating and cooling on an open door. If I were a landlord, I would have no incentive to upgrade HVAC on any building I own, because doing one would compel them all to do it, and start an arms race with my competitors that would cost my dearly without being able to raise the rent to maintain my profits, since my tenants are already underwater. Fancy businesses with exclusively rich patrons have probably already upgraded their HVAC while we were all arguing about whether to wear masks or not, because unlike the rest of us, they aren’t constrained by the cost of remaining diligent at protecting their customers. But I bet they only improved their HVAC filtration, and added UV lights somewhere, rather than actually implementing real and serious air exchange protocols. No bank is going to offer a landlord a low-interest HVAC upgrade loan for their building, because to do so for any one business would begin a run on the bank by every landlord and business in the world, who would demand that same loan be extended to them, while simultaneously spiking the risk of their entire portfolio of commercial property mortgages, forcing them to recapitalize or go bust. Changing building codes will only affect new buildings, which is worthless for stopping this winter’s annual pandemic (whether it’s covid or flu or both). It’s a fine thing to do, but existing buildings will be given an exception. Everyone’s acting in self-interest to the exclusion of others, and the only thing that’s going to be enough to break that cycle is for governments to invest GDP directly into HVAC renovation, for every single building in the world. This isn’t a flashy solution, and there really isn’t much tech can do to help here. We simply need boots on the ground in every building in the world, and the supply chains and government funding necessary to deliver that. But maybe we, HN readers and founders, can help. If one of you can write a tool that shows us how much renovations will truly cost, and you can reduce your estimate to a simple set of inputs^ then you have a chance to make it possible. Today we make up numbers and have no idea what it truly costs to upgrade air exchange for the cities of New York, Atherton, or Barcelona. We don’t have any idea at all. Build a tool that tells us, so that we can convince the world to prevent the next Covid. ^ For example, using these four inputs — number of rooms, number of floors, number of stairwells, number of elevators — you could offer a calculator that lets anyone punch in a building’s data from blueprints and permits, offer permalinks that store the building data, and offer to subscribe them to cost updates when the algorithm is improved.
• h0nd 5y ago
  Does curbing SARS-CoV-2 delay the end of the pandemic?
  • bluGill 5y ago
    Depends on how much you curb it. Just a little and it delays things. Do it enough and it will end sooner. Vaccines are the best way to do the latter, the US is close to the end and could be done with the pandemic if just a "few" million more got their vaccine. Even the "just a little" delay is a good thing though. It gives doctors time to find better treatments.