19 ms·

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

165 points by stmw 5y ago

codeddesign 5y ago
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.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
They already solved this in NYC and Chicago with extra hot radiators by windows. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curious-history-of-steam-heat-and-pandemics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio... The “spent breath” of the occupants of poorly ventilated homes contributed to 40% of the deaths in the country, he claimed, and often said “man’s own breath is his greatest enemy.” He would spend decades promoting the cause, designing ventilation schemes for buildings, penning a 1869 book, Leeds on Ventilation, and lecturing across the country. He explained his ideas with the aid of a “magic lantern” projector — think old-timey Powerpoint presentations. He’d show slides of a family in their drawing room, then add a slide showing red air coming out of the father’s mouth. The child crawling on the floor would eventually fall over. It “scared people to death,” Holohan says. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pandemic-changed-home-heat-radiators https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pan...
- chillwaves 5y ago
  There is also a problem of comfortable humidity levels. If you just have open windows, it seems like you will have very dry air. There are modern solutions for air exchanges that do retain some of the heat and moisture while allowing for fresh air to ventilate the indoor space. https://www.explainthatstuff.com/heat-recovery-ventilation.html https://www.explainthatstuff.com/heat-recovery-ventilation.h...
  - Madmallard 5y ago
    ? If your windows are open you will trend toward outside weather. If you’re in a dry climate then yeah it’ll be dryer but the reverse is also true. Outside air is far better than inside nearly everywhere in the world
    - newaccount74 5y ago
      Cold air can hold a lot less water vapor than warm air. If you open the window when it's cold outside, then the air will become very dry as it heats up. So even if you have 80% humidity outside on a cold winters day, once that air gets inside and heats up to room temperature it's going to be like 20% humidity.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Indeed, even in San Francisco I measured indoor humidity as low as 18% before I got a humidifier, and dryer+colder places (e.g. Salt Lake City) could be even lower inside. Humidity below 40-50% at indoor temperatures has noticeable negative effects for me. As other comments have mentioned, in the long run for maximum health and maximum energy efficiency we really need to design our buildings to be air tight, with energy-recovering ventilation systems and humidity control.
      - Izkata 5y ago
        That happens even if you don't open your windows, since buildings aren't perfectly sealed.
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        It also depends greatly on how well your structure is insulated and where (or whether) vapour barriers exist. Vapour condenses against cold surfaces. This is why in winter poorly-glazed (e.g., single-glazed) windows "steam" up (really: condense), or frost over. Similarly water will condense against exterior walls, and may lead to degraded sheetrock (newer construction) or plaster (in older buildings), or rot. Where walls are insulated, a vapour barrier _before_ the insulation can lead to condensation inside the wall, again, against the exterior (cold) surface. The result is that even if the interior is humidified, moisture is "sucked out" by the exterior cold. (More accurately: vapour condenses against cold surfaces.) In summer, the problem is reversed, with warm humid exterior air condensing on surfaces cooled by interior air conditioning --- the outside of windows, or again, inside walls. Interiors can see higher relative humidity than the outside, and dehumidifiers may be needed.
- timschmidt 5y ago
  Reminds me of The Lost Art of Steam Heating by Dan Holohan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQB0KK2rxcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQB0KK2rxcw
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Excellent video and information, as well as a rabbit hole to dive into (Holohan's work). Thanks!
coding123 5y ago
> 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 N95 mask since late April 2020 while around people - but a video of such a study showing definitive transmission would have shut down the entire mask hate early.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  There were some rather convincing case studies even early in the pandemic -- for instance, one news story from March 2020 identified a choir rehearsal as a superspreader event: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
- KevinEldon 5y ago
  You’re volunteering?
  - jaspax 5y ago
    I would volunteer. It turns out that I have COVID right now, giving me a mild headache, nasal congestion, and a persistent cough---annoying, but not more than that. I would have gladly volunteered for this level of mild discomfort in order to advance the cause of science. Wouldn't even be hard.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Please keep a close eye on your blood o2 saturation and stay in contact with your doctor.
  - Zak 5y ago
    There have been human challenge studies for covid, and people did volunteer. It would have likely been possible to get volunteers for the type of study the grandparent comment describes. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-19-human-challenge-trial-launches-study-immune-response-covid-19 https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-19-human-challenge-trial-l...
nicoburns 5y ago
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.
- Angostura 5y ago
  The UK government is running ads https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-campaign-to-stop-covid-19-hanging-around https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-campaign-to-stop-covi...
- anonporridge 5y ago
  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 without the risk of pathogens.
  - oleganza 5y ago
    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.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Only one camp is hysterical.
  - _delirium 5y ago
    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.
orblivion 5y ago
It baffles me that Fauci etc didn't mention this in the next breath after hand washing and masking. It's easy during nice weather.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Is hand washing even that relevant given the virus gets mostly inhaled? I've never seen any studies on this.
  - nikolay 5y ago
    I haven't seen any proof either. But people keep poisoning their lungs with alcohol and other toxic vapors!
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      To be clear, I'm very much in favor of hand washing and have been using hand sanitizer whenever I come home since we'll before the pandemic. It helps with other infectious diseases, but I wonder about COVID
      - jhugo 5y ago
        Washing your hands properly with soap and water is much more effective than hand sanitiser in typical use. Hand sanitiser is most useful when you don't have convenient access to soap and hot water. Since you're arriving home anyway, you might as well wash your hands properly — the skin on your hands will thank you for one less exposure to hand sanitiser, too.
        hanniabu 5y ago
        Hand sanitizer is more effective than your average person's hand washing practices, which is pretty poor
        jhugo 5y ago
IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
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.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  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.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    And they require the driver to have recirculate off, fresh intake on.
- justusw 5y ago
  In Tokyo most train companies agreed to keep the windows open at all times and encourage passengers to lower the windows if they see a closed one. Cooperation is very high and I only see them closed when it rains.
- tapan_jk 5y ago
  I used to prefer Uber/Ola over the humble auto rickshaw [1] mainly because of two reasons: cars are safer; and an air-conditioned car helps avoid pollution from traffic (which is quite high in Bangalore). Now I prefer auto rickshaws (at least for short distances) because they are well ventilated due to its door-less design. The back seat of an auto rickshaw is constantly braving the elements (sunlight, dust and wind) and is likely to be more germ free in this context. To make it even better, now these autos have a transparent plastic screen between the driver and riders, thereby isolating them from each other while being open to the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw
bb123 5y ago
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.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
  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 with politics
  - bb123 5y ago
    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.
  - oleganza 5y ago
    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.
  - 5y ago
323 5y ago
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, ...)
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Most office buildings also do not have windows that open at all.
  - jhugo 5y ago
    These office buildings usually have automated ventilation which if specced properly can provide equivalent or more air exchanges per hour than open windows. As a bonus, automated ventilation can include a heat exchanger, while an open window can't.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  Heat exchangers can recover a large fraction of the energy lost through ventilation. Modern systems can even recover humidity from the air leaving the building. Air purifiers are very loud and mostly effective at removing particulates. If you want to remove VOCs, formaldehyde and CO2 then ventilation is a lot more effective. A well designed ventilation system can be completely inaudible.
  - jhugo 5y ago
    > Air purifiers are very loud and mostly effective at removing particulates. If you want to remove VOCs, formaldehyde and CO2 then ventilation is a lot more effective. Modern air purifiers are basically silent in normal operation, and there are models that remove VOCs and formaldehyde. CO2 is still best removed with ventilation.
    - newaccount74 5y ago
      > Modern air purifiers are basically silent in normal operation Maybe on the lowest setting, but I doubt you'll actually have clean air on the lowest setting. Especially if you want to filter VOCs.
jaimex2 5y ago
Explains Queensland doing so well here in Australia thinking about it. Everything is built with high ventilation flow in mind.
- mbo 5y ago
  I thought exactly the same thing! For those unaware, Queensland (population 5.185 million) _still_ has yet to have a large scale outbreak since March 2020. It's common to have windows permanently open with fly screens here. And houses in the typical Queenslander architectural style[0] are up on stilts and deliberately laid out to encourage a breeze pulling air from front to back. Rooms are often not sealed, with fanlights above door-frames allowing in airflow. This design philosophy extends to commercial buildings as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture)
  - dragonsky67 5y ago
    Except that a lot of our Government buildings were built in the 1970s and are totally reliant upon HVAC which even in the cooler months may struggle with getting enough air flow. (Cooler months, average temp about 23 deg C). I'm sure that when I'm in the office I'm not getting any fresh air. Only benefit is at the moment about 70% of the workers on any one day are working from home.
sharperguy 5y ago
A metaphor I was thinking of earlier. If a guy is going to piss on you, you're going to be happy if he has to keep a pair of speedos on as he attempts it. You could also just move further away from him. But if you're both swimming in the same pool while he pisses in it, those speedos will make little difference anymore. Neither will your distance from him help very much. What will help much more is the amount of water in the pool, and the amount of fresh water being pumped in and old water pumped out.
- lanecwagner 5y ago
  not a great metaphor imo. gives the impression masks and distance do nothing, and we know they do
- irjustin 5y ago
  Sometimes metaphors are less than helpful. This is one. > Neither will your distance from him help very much. The amount of piss distributed is still determined by volume, so more distance => weaker concentration, which... helps a lot?
  - beagle3 5y ago
    only in the transient stage. in the "steady state", it distributes evenly to the entire pool, and the only thing that matters is total volume (+ intake, - outlet), distance irrelevant.
    - irjustin 5y ago
      True assuming good mixing (big assumption), but why are you conveniently throwing out concentration? Are you assuming that if "any part of the piss touches me, regardless of how much - i die."? edit: sorry thought you were grandparent poster and was a little more aggressive. But still..
- eloeffler 5y ago
  You'd have to use a very special Speedo in this example, though. One that filters microparticles out of the urine, keeping large parts the grossness inside. Also, don't touch the outside!
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Also worth mentioning that this is historically not unprecedented. During the Spanish Flu the agreed policy for the schools that remained open was to have outside classrooms for children, or in winter to keep the heating on but with all windows open.
willyt 5y ago
> 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 conventional houses, at 0.4 ACH all the air in the house is replaced approximately every 2.5 hours. All while having a whole house heat load measuring in the hundreds of watts to maintain 21ºC inside when it’s -1ºC outside. There is no reason not to put MVHR in normal houses, it’s just not possible to supply all the heat demand using air supply alone so you need a conventional heating system as well. EDIT: Also this just goes to show what happens when people make uninformed comments on fields they don’t understand, this sentence could make a whole lot of work on reducing energy consumption in buildings get thrown out the window. I would have expected better from people that have just had 1.5 years first hand experience of the effects of misinformation on their own field.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  In much of the world for much of the year, it doesn't get below freezing for at least part of the day. The solution to the heating problem is simple then: simply don't. Open windows when it's above 50F / 10C (to give a healthy safety margin to the water pipes) and tell people to wear sweaters. Do this where it's possible and you'll offset the energy expenditure of heating in places were it actually earnestly gets cold. And for that matter, limit their thermostats to 50F / 10C too. Being able to wear t-shirts in the winter when there's a blizzard outside is an absurd luxury.
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    I'm surprised the opening the window part is still not been mentioned much. It's been several months since Hong Kong made all establishments to maintain air flow of 25 times per hour (something like that). It's definitely more difficult to tell colder climate countries to open windows, but really just wear a sweater or a jacket.
nikolay 5y ago
How about ionizing the air where it's cold and impractical to open the windows? There are nice devices, which have certification, and don't produce ozone. When I traveled to Europe this year, I saw ionizers in the Munich airport and nowhere else, unfortunately.
- iso8859-1 5y ago
  Plants also produce negative ions. May be the cheaper and prettier option.
  - nikolay 5y ago
    You need a lot of plants though! NASA had some quality studies on types of plants.
exabrial 5y ago
I've mentioned this a bunch of times: Having 10 businesses increase airflow is way easier than getting 10,000 people to wear masks.
nradov 5y ago
I'm fully in favor of more ventilation and improved indoor air quality, however they aren't really thinking things through long term. Since the virus is now endemic and can't be eradicated, we'll all be exposed occasionally regardless of whether the windows are open. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Fwiw, this is more op-ed than it is medical science. Nothing wrong with that per se. Just worth mentioning.
- harry8 5y ago
  We're all exposed to traffic accidents. So we take precautions with road infrastructure (eg traffic lights, zebra crossings etc). Going from being exposed occasionally to being exposed less often than that is a good thing! Same as crossing a road being exposed to being hit by a vehicle. You don't have to "just accept it". Minimising risk given acceptable levels of cost of doing so is a good thing! Think of better ventilation like fitting pedistrian crossing lights in dangerous intersections. It's not going to eradicate all traffic, obviously.
  - nradov 5y ago
    You're not thinking things through. You might be able to delay exposure for a while but you won't be able to prevent it forever.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      You can limit the level and frequency of exposure via things like ventilation, and we're pretty sure viral load matters for how sick you get.
    - harry8 5y ago
      No you're not. Really. I think you're living in a world where you believe if you've had covid you're done and you will never get it or future variants again. That's not how it is. The less often you contract a covid-19 variant the healthier /you/ are likely to be. For the immunocompromised contracting it /never/ is attainable. The less of it around, the lower the velocity of transmission the easier that goal is to attain. "just give up" is not acceptable policy in either intent or outcome. It's mental, in fact.
dghughes 5y ago
It was -2C here at today noon and winter's barely begun, it's actually warmer than usual it should be about -10C. Plus I just spent $420 for half a tank of heating fuel. Fuel oil prices currently $1.18/liter are jumping and next time it will probably be $500 for the same amount of oil. No I'm not opening the windows. Plus the pipes would burst if it got cold enough inside the house. If I want fresh air I'll get that when shovelling snow. School and business wold be in the same situation most use fuel oil or local steam line. But wasting energy by opening windows is not a solution during a northern winter.
kleiba 5y ago
Healthcare, homes, schools, and workplaces should have been encouraged to improve ventilation at the very beginning of the pandemic, but tardy recognition of the airborne route by leading authorities in 2020 stalled any progress that could have been made at that stage. I cannot relate with this judgment, regularly venting (about every 20 minutes, I believe) has been the standard in schools and day cares where I live for at least a year.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
The plastic barriers that have become so common are an egregious example of this. They hurt air circulation and don't prevent transmission, but they're cheap and appear to do something. I've wondered why restaurants haven't started using some sort of fan attached to a high quality air filter, basically a cheap air purifier. And for more intensive usecases, why not have chambers that are sealed off and have a powered filter as the intake? I'm not the expert here so there's probably a good reason why, but it was a little weird seeing everybody focus on ventilators at the beginning of the pandemic instead of filtration.
- jmspring 5y ago
  Didn’t read the article? But in the US inside there aren’t plastic barriers. There will be no updating of hvac systems. I’m pro mask indoors, but favor places that are pro vaccine card. WA and OR were more appropriate to this than CA. You will not, outside super heavy government subsidy, get better interior filtration in the US. I say this as a business owner who could probably persuade the building owner to offset part of the charge, but the cost doesn’t make sense.
wowokay 5y ago
That makes sense, you live in Seattle where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate more then 20 degrees. If we are giving simple solutions and changing the focus to energy conservation why not just increase energy production? It’s not like our power needs are going down, how about focusing on innovations in that space before taking restrictive measures?
ncphil 5y ago
Anyone heard about Corsi-Rosenthal boxes? https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/ https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/. A box fan and 4 x 2 inch MERV 13 filters. Around $100, including the duct tape. This design is very effective, surpassing commercial air cleaners that are three times more expensive in independent tests. https://cleanaircrew.org/ufaq/does-the-corsi-rosenthal-box-work/ https://cleanaircrew.org/ufaq/does-the-corsi-rosenthal-box-w....
kochikame 5y ago
In Japan, ventilation has always been seen as one of the main ways to keep cases low. Restaurants and bars keep their doors and windows open, busses and trains have windows open, campaigns encourage everyone to open any windows in offices and homes for ten minutes every hour... even in winter. Seems like the science supports thi snow but for many years foreigners in Japan have traditionally and famously complained about "how stupid it is to have the windows open in winter"... the table shave turned.
- higeorge13 5y ago
  Tourists were laughing with people wearing masks in trains, buses and malls as well. Imagine the shock after March 2020.
throwaway55421 5y ago
Yeah, no. Having literally every indoor space be freezing cold is not reasonable. In the UK this happened earlier in the year (no-one cares any more) and generally everyone would huddle in the most sheltered part of a venue to make up for it. And no, we're not installing magic new tech in every building.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Having literally every indoor space be freezing cold is not reasonable. You are absolutely correct. I have heat and insulation to keep the cold out. And it works: It is currently -9C/16F and though I feel a small draft from the closed window, I'm also not wearing a coat indoors. I'd be huddling under a blanket otherwise.

165 points by stmw 5y ago

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.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

They already solved this in NYC and Chicago with extra hot radiators by windows. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curious-history-of-steam-heat-and-pandemics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio... The “spent breath” of the occupants of poorly ventilated homes contributed to 40% of the deaths in the country, he claimed, and often said “man’s own breath is his greatest enemy.” He would spend decades promoting the cause, designing ventilation schemes for buildings, penning a 1869 book, Leeds on Ventilation, and lecturing across the country. He explained his ideas with the aid of a “magic lantern” projector — think old-timey Powerpoint presentations. He’d show slides of a family in their drawing room, then add a slide showing red air coming out of the father’s mouth. The child crawling on the floor would eventually fall over. It “scared people to death,” Holohan says. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pandemic-changed-home-heat-radiators https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pan...

chillwaves 5y ago
There is also a problem of comfortable humidity levels. If you just have open windows, it seems like you will have very dry air. There are modern solutions for air exchanges that do retain some of the heat and moisture while allowing for fresh air to ventilate the indoor space. https://www.explainthatstuff.com/heat-recovery-ventilation.html https://www.explainthatstuff.com/heat-recovery-ventilation.h...
- Madmallard 5y ago
  ? If your windows are open you will trend toward outside weather. If you’re in a dry climate then yeah it’ll be dryer but the reverse is also true. Outside air is far better than inside nearly everywhere in the world
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    Cold air can hold a lot less water vapor than warm air. If you open the window when it's cold outside, then the air will become very dry as it heats up. So even if you have 80% humidity outside on a cold winters day, once that air gets inside and heats up to room temperature it's going to be like 20% humidity.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Indeed, even in San Francisco I measured indoor humidity as low as 18% before I got a humidifier, and dryer+colder places (e.g. Salt Lake City) could be even lower inside. Humidity below 40-50% at indoor temperatures has noticeable negative effects for me. As other comments have mentioned, in the long run for maximum health and maximum energy efficiency we really need to design our buildings to be air tight, with energy-recovering ventilation systems and humidity control.
    - Izkata 5y ago
      That happens even if you don't open your windows, since buildings aren't perfectly sealed.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        It also depends greatly on how well your structure is insulated and where (or whether) vapour barriers exist. Vapour condenses against cold surfaces. This is why in winter poorly-glazed (e.g., single-glazed) windows "steam" up (really: condense), or frost over. Similarly water will condense against exterior walls, and may lead to degraded sheetrock (newer construction) or plaster (in older buildings), or rot. Where walls are insulated, a vapour barrier _before_ the insulation can lead to condensation inside the wall, again, against the exterior (cold) surface. The result is that even if the interior is humidified, moisture is "sucked out" by the exterior cold. (More accurately: vapour condenses against cold surfaces.) In summer, the problem is reversed, with warm humid exterior air condensing on surfaces cooled by interior air conditioning --- the outside of windows, or again, inside walls. Interiors can see higher relative humidity than the outside, and dehumidifiers may be needed.
timschmidt 5y ago
Reminds me of The Lost Art of Steam Heating by Dan Holohan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQB0KK2rxcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQB0KK2rxcw
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Excellent video and information, as well as a rabbit hole to dive into (Holohan's work). Thanks!

coding123 5y ago

> 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 N95 mask since late April 2020 while around people - but a video of such a study showing definitive transmission would have shut down the entire mask hate early.

duskwuff 5y ago
There were some rather convincing case studies even early in the pandemic -- for instance, one news story from March 2020 identified a choir rehearsal as a superspreader event: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
KevinEldon 5y ago
You’re volunteering?
- jaspax 5y ago
  I would volunteer. It turns out that I have COVID right now, giving me a mild headache, nasal congestion, and a persistent cough---annoying, but not more than that. I would have gladly volunteered for this level of mild discomfort in order to advance the cause of science. Wouldn't even be hard.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Please keep a close eye on your blood o2 saturation and stay in contact with your doctor.
- Zak 5y ago
  There have been human challenge studies for covid, and people did volunteer. It would have likely been possible to get volunteers for the type of study the grandparent comment describes. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-19-human-challenge-trial-launches-study-immune-response-covid-19 https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-19-human-challenge-trial-l...

nicoburns 5y ago

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.

Angostura 5y ago
The UK government is running ads https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-campaign-to-stop-covid-19-hanging-around https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-campaign-to-stop-covi...
anonporridge 5y ago
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 without the risk of pathogens.
- oleganza 5y ago
  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.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Only one camp is hysterical.
- _delirium 5y ago
  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.

orblivion 5y ago

It baffles me that Fauci etc didn't mention this in the next breath after hand washing and masking. It's easy during nice weather.

ajmurmann 5y ago
Is hand washing even that relevant given the virus gets mostly inhaled? I've never seen any studies on this.
- nikolay 5y ago
  I haven't seen any proof either. But people keep poisoning their lungs with alcohol and other toxic vapors!
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    To be clear, I'm very much in favor of hand washing and have been using hand sanitizer whenever I come home since we'll before the pandemic. It helps with other infectious diseases, but I wonder about COVID
    - jhugo 5y ago
      Washing your hands properly with soap and water is much more effective than hand sanitiser in typical use. Hand sanitiser is most useful when you don't have convenient access to soap and hot water. Since you're arriving home anyway, you might as well wash your hands properly — the skin on your hands will thank you for one less exposure to hand sanitiser, too.
      - hanniabu 5y ago
        Hand sanitizer is more effective than your average person's hand washing practices, which is pretty poor
        jhugo 5y ago

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago

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.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
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.
- Terretta 5y ago
  And they require the driver to have recirculate off, fresh intake on.
justusw 5y ago
In Tokyo most train companies agreed to keep the windows open at all times and encourage passengers to lower the windows if they see a closed one. Cooperation is very high and I only see them closed when it rains.
tapan_jk 5y ago
I used to prefer Uber/Ola over the humble auto rickshaw [1] mainly because of two reasons: cars are safer; and an air-conditioned car helps avoid pollution from traffic (which is quite high in Bangalore). Now I prefer auto rickshaws (at least for short distances) because they are well ventilated due to its door-less design. The back seat of an auto rickshaw is constantly braving the elements (sunlight, dust and wind) and is likely to be more germ free in this context. To make it even better, now these autos have a transparent plastic screen between the driver and riders, thereby isolating them from each other while being open to the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw

bb123 5y ago

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.

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
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 with politics
- bb123 5y ago
  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.
- oleganza 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago

323 5y ago

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, ...)

koheripbal 5y ago
Most office buildings also do not have windows that open at all.
- jhugo 5y ago
  These office buildings usually have automated ventilation which if specced properly can provide equivalent or more air exchanges per hour than open windows. As a bonus, automated ventilation can include a heat exchanger, while an open window can't.
newaccount74 5y ago
Heat exchangers can recover a large fraction of the energy lost through ventilation. Modern systems can even recover humidity from the air leaving the building. Air purifiers are very loud and mostly effective at removing particulates. If you want to remove VOCs, formaldehyde and CO2 then ventilation is a lot more effective. A well designed ventilation system can be completely inaudible.
- jhugo 5y ago
  > Air purifiers are very loud and mostly effective at removing particulates. If you want to remove VOCs, formaldehyde and CO2 then ventilation is a lot more effective. Modern air purifiers are basically silent in normal operation, and there are models that remove VOCs and formaldehyde. CO2 is still best removed with ventilation.
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    > Modern air purifiers are basically silent in normal operation Maybe on the lowest setting, but I doubt you'll actually have clean air on the lowest setting. Especially if you want to filter VOCs.

jaimex2 5y ago

Explains Queensland doing so well here in Australia thinking about it. Everything is built with high ventilation flow in mind.

mbo 5y ago
I thought exactly the same thing! For those unaware, Queensland (population 5.185 million) _still_ has yet to have a large scale outbreak since March 2020. It's common to have windows permanently open with fly screens here. And houses in the typical Queenslander architectural style[0] are up on stilts and deliberately laid out to encourage a breeze pulling air from front to back. Rooms are often not sealed, with fanlights above door-frames allowing in airflow. This design philosophy extends to commercial buildings as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture)
- dragonsky67 5y ago
  Except that a lot of our Government buildings were built in the 1970s and are totally reliant upon HVAC which even in the cooler months may struggle with getting enough air flow. (Cooler months, average temp about 23 deg C). I'm sure that when I'm in the office I'm not getting any fresh air. Only benefit is at the moment about 70% of the workers on any one day are working from home.

sharperguy 5y ago

A metaphor I was thinking of earlier. If a guy is going to piss on you, you're going to be happy if he has to keep a pair of speedos on as he attempts it. You could also just move further away from him. But if you're both swimming in the same pool while he pisses in it, those speedos will make little difference anymore. Neither will your distance from him help very much. What will help much more is the amount of water in the pool, and the amount of fresh water being pumped in and old water pumped out.

lanecwagner 5y ago
not a great metaphor imo. gives the impression masks and distance do nothing, and we know they do
irjustin 5y ago
Sometimes metaphors are less than helpful. This is one. > Neither will your distance from him help very much. The amount of piss distributed is still determined by volume, so more distance => weaker concentration, which... helps a lot?
- beagle3 5y ago
  only in the transient stage. in the "steady state", it distributes evenly to the entire pool, and the only thing that matters is total volume (+ intake, - outlet), distance irrelevant.
  - irjustin 5y ago
    True assuming good mixing (big assumption), but why are you conveniently throwing out concentration? Are you assuming that if "any part of the piss touches me, regardless of how much - i die."? edit: sorry thought you were grandparent poster and was a little more aggressive. But still..
eloeffler 5y ago
You'd have to use a very special Speedo in this example, though. One that filters microparticles out of the urine, keeping large parts the grossness inside. Also, don't touch the outside!

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

Also worth mentioning that this is historically not unprecedented. During the Spanish Flu the agreed policy for the schools that remained open was to have outside classrooms for children, or in winter to keep the heating on but with all windows open.

willyt 5y ago

> 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 conventional houses, at 0.4 ACH all the air in the house is replaced approximately every 2.5 hours. All while having a whole house heat load measuring in the hundreds of watts to maintain 21ºC inside when it’s -1ºC outside. There is no reason not to put MVHR in normal houses, it’s just not possible to supply all the heat demand using air supply alone so you need a conventional heating system as well. EDIT: Also this just goes to show what happens when people make uninformed comments on fields they don’t understand, this sentence could make a whole lot of work on reducing energy consumption in buildings get thrown out the window. I would have expected better from people that have just had 1.5 years first hand experience of the effects of misinformation on their own field.

Eelongate 5y ago
In much of the world for much of the year, it doesn't get below freezing for at least part of the day. The solution to the heating problem is simple then: simply don't. Open windows when it's above 50F / 10C (to give a healthy safety margin to the water pipes) and tell people to wear sweaters. Do this where it's possible and you'll offset the energy expenditure of heating in places were it actually earnestly gets cold. And for that matter, limit their thermostats to 50F / 10C too. Being able to wear t-shirts in the winter when there's a blizzard outside is an absurd luxury.
- antoniuschan99 5y ago
  I'm surprised the opening the window part is still not been mentioned much. It's been several months since Hong Kong made all establishments to maintain air flow of 25 times per hour (something like that). It's definitely more difficult to tell colder climate countries to open windows, but really just wear a sweater or a jacket.

nikolay 5y ago

How about ionizing the air where it's cold and impractical to open the windows? There are nice devices, which have certification, and don't produce ozone. When I traveled to Europe this year, I saw ionizers in the Munich airport and nowhere else, unfortunately.

iso8859-1 5y ago
Plants also produce negative ions. May be the cheaper and prettier option.
- nikolay 5y ago
  You need a lot of plants though! NASA had some quality studies on types of plants.

exabrial 5y ago

I've mentioned this a bunch of times: Having 10 businesses increase airflow is way easier than getting 10,000 people to wear masks.

nradov 5y ago

I'm fully in favor of more ventilation and improved indoor air quality, however they aren't really thinking things through long term. Since the virus is now endemic and can't be eradicated, we'll all be exposed occasionally regardless of whether the windows are open. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646 https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

chiefalchemist 5y ago
Fwiw, this is more op-ed than it is medical science. Nothing wrong with that per se. Just worth mentioning.
harry8 5y ago
We're all exposed to traffic accidents. So we take precautions with road infrastructure (eg traffic lights, zebra crossings etc). Going from being exposed occasionally to being exposed less often than that is a good thing! Same as crossing a road being exposed to being hit by a vehicle. You don't have to "just accept it". Minimising risk given acceptable levels of cost of doing so is a good thing! Think of better ventilation like fitting pedistrian crossing lights in dangerous intersections. It's not going to eradicate all traffic, obviously.
- nradov 5y ago
  You're not thinking things through. You might be able to delay exposure for a while but you won't be able to prevent it forever.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    You can limit the level and frequency of exposure via things like ventilation, and we're pretty sure viral load matters for how sick you get.
  - harry8 5y ago
    No you're not. Really. I think you're living in a world where you believe if you've had covid you're done and you will never get it or future variants again. That's not how it is. The less often you contract a covid-19 variant the healthier /you/ are likely to be. For the immunocompromised contracting it /never/ is attainable. The less of it around, the lower the velocity of transmission the easier that goal is to attain. "just give up" is not acceptable policy in either intent or outcome. It's mental, in fact.

dghughes 5y ago

It was -2C here at today noon and winter's barely begun, it's actually warmer than usual it should be about -10C. Plus I just spent $420 for half a tank of heating fuel. Fuel oil prices currently $1.18/liter are jumping and next time it will probably be $500 for the same amount of oil. No I'm not opening the windows. Plus the pipes would burst if it got cold enough inside the house. If I want fresh air I'll get that when shovelling snow. School and business wold be in the same situation most use fuel oil or local steam line. But wasting energy by opening windows is not a solution during a northern winter.

kleiba 5y ago

Healthcare, homes, schools, and workplaces should have been encouraged to improve ventilation at the very beginning of the pandemic, but tardy recognition of the airborne route by leading authorities in 2020 stalled any progress that could have been made at that stage. I cannot relate with this judgment, regularly venting (about every 20 minutes, I believe) has been the standard in schools and day cares where I live for at least a year.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

The plastic barriers that have become so common are an egregious example of this. They hurt air circulation and don't prevent transmission, but they're cheap and appear to do something. I've wondered why restaurants haven't started using some sort of fan attached to a high quality air filter, basically a cheap air purifier. And for more intensive usecases, why not have chambers that are sealed off and have a powered filter as the intake? I'm not the expert here so there's probably a good reason why, but it was a little weird seeing everybody focus on ventilators at the beginning of the pandemic instead of filtration.

jmspring 5y ago
Didn’t read the article? But in the US inside there aren’t plastic barriers. There will be no updating of hvac systems. I’m pro mask indoors, but favor places that are pro vaccine card. WA and OR were more appropriate to this than CA. You will not, outside super heavy government subsidy, get better interior filtration in the US. I say this as a business owner who could probably persuade the building owner to offset part of the charge, but the cost doesn’t make sense.

wowokay 5y ago

That makes sense, you live in Seattle where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate more then 20 degrees. If we are giving simple solutions and changing the focus to energy conservation why not just increase energy production? It’s not like our power needs are going down, how about focusing on innovations in that space before taking restrictive measures?

ncphil 5y ago

Anyone heard about Corsi-Rosenthal boxes? https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/ https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/. A box fan and 4 x 2 inch MERV 13 filters. Around $100, including the duct tape. This design is very effective, surpassing commercial air cleaners that are three times more expensive in independent tests. https://cleanaircrew.org/ufaq/does-the-corsi-rosenthal-box-work/ https://cleanaircrew.org/ufaq/does-the-corsi-rosenthal-box-w....

kochikame 5y ago

In Japan, ventilation has always been seen as one of the main ways to keep cases low. Restaurants and bars keep their doors and windows open, busses and trains have windows open, campaigns encourage everyone to open any windows in offices and homes for ten minutes every hour... even in winter. Seems like the science supports thi snow but for many years foreigners in Japan have traditionally and famously complained about "how stupid it is to have the windows open in winter"... the table shave turned.

higeorge13 5y ago
Tourists were laughing with people wearing masks in trains, buses and malls as well. Imagine the shock after March 2020.

throwaway55421 5y ago

Yeah, no. Having literally every indoor space be freezing cold is not reasonable. In the UK this happened earlier in the year (no-one cares any more) and generally everyone would huddle in the most sheltered part of a venue to make up for it. And no, we're not installing magic new tech in every building.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
Having literally every indoor space be freezing cold is not reasonable. You are absolutely correct. I have heat and insulation to keep the cold out. And it works: It is currently -9C/16F and though I feel a small draft from the closed window, I'm also not wearing a coat indoors. I'd be huddling under a blanket otherwise.