19 ms·

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 poorl

• 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.
    • Der_Einzige 5y ago
      Well, given that virus particles start to be meaningfully filtered only at a certain MERV level (14?), that upgrade may in fact have been more than a "minor symbolic" gesture.
      • mlyle 5y ago
        MERV-13 is pretty good. Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up. It then comes down to how many air changes you can expect.
        • marcosdumay 5y ago
          > Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up. What means it's probably useless against any airbone virus. But it's pretty great against particle pollution, in case you want to use it in a private space.
          • mlyle 5y ago
            Viruses don't circulate bare in the air. Droplets containing viruses do. It's thought that it's mostly carried within droplets that are 5um or larger. Just in case smaller particles have a substantial role, I quoted the 1um number.
  • mike_hock 5y ago
    > it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare Sounds extremely far-fetched. Any terrorist attack will be designed with the countermeasures in mind. Deploying enough biological agent to swamp the ventilation system would likely not be an issue.
    • geoduck14 5y ago
      I'm pretty certain I worked in an open-floor plan office that had windows designed to "impede" small airplanes being flown into it. I speculate this fact -after- a someone actually did fly their airplane into our building. The pilot received exceptionally bad customer service from us and was attempting to kill one of our leaders.
      • mike_hock 5y ago
        Lesson learned: Don't give bad customer service if you work in the World Trade Center.
  • vondur 5y ago
    Ha, at the University where I work, they are "upgrading" the windows to more energy efficient (good) but they will no longer be able to open up to the outside. All of the occupants complained, but sorry too late to change the plans, even though we don't have a contractor picked yet. We also have a relatively mild climate where opening the windows 10 months out of the year would insure adequate cooling.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    A couple years ago I bought a CO2 meter, and was astonished to see it going over 1000ppm in my office. Since then, I always keep the window cracked, keeping the CO2 levels usually under 500. The meter was one of the best investments I ever made.
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yeah when our office got those meters it suddenly explained why I got pounding headaches after long days. I'm pretty sensitive to it apparently. I've seen it go as high as 1400 :(
      • WalterBright 5y ago
        Cognitive performance starts declining at 1000 ppm.
        • anonporridge 5y ago
          Makes me wonder if the atmospheric increase from ~280ppm to the current 420ppm over the past 200 years is having some minor, but statistically significant effect on our collective cognition. If it is, it's probably far overwhelmed by the shear weight of more well educated people and better tools at our disposal.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      I've done the same recently for my home. It's tough to keep good interior air in the winter when the building is not designed for it.
• duxup 5y ago
  Medical policy always seems to float around various ideas before they really grab hold. It maybe shouldn't but it takes time it seems.
• delecti 5y ago
  For better or worse, the medical community is usually hesitant to recommend things before studies have been done, and some "common sense" advice is difficult to test.
  • WithinReason 5y ago
    Masks have been recommended heavily since the beginning without good evidence that they are effective. [0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v... CONCLUSIONS Most included trials had poor design, reporting and sparse events. There was insufficient evidence to provide a recommendation on the use of facial barriers without other measures. We found insufficient evidence for a difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators and limited evidence to support effectiveness of quarantine. Based on observational evidence from the previous SARS epidemic included in the previous version of our Cochrane review we recommend the use of masks combined with other measures.
    • jonstewart 5y ago
      This paper’s from March, 2020?
      • WithinReason 5y ago
        Note that I said "since the beginning".
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          Which is also incorrect; the US Surgeon General tweeted masks "are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus" in Feb 2020, and Fauci said "There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask" in Mar 2020. Recommendations were frequently firmly against masking early on.
          • dredmorbius 5y ago
• 323 5y ago
  There have been documented cases of infections happening in seconds. Yes, longer exposure time increases infection probability, but the 15 min threshold is arbitrary, like the 2 meter social distancing. A bit like the "you can pick up food from the floor if it sat there for less than 5 seconds" meme.
  • calsy 5y ago
    How are infections measured in seconds?
    • exclipy 5y ago
      In Australia earlier this year when infections were happening the rate of single-digits per day, they could trace the source of an infection to a fleeting encounter of two people walking past each other in a shop. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-22/covid19-cctv-footage-worrying-nsw-health-authorities/100231832 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-22/covid19-cctv-footage-...
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        I haven't followed Australia's progress with COVID-19, so I hope these questions aren't too obvious or bothersome: Were these single-digit infections all symptomatic, or were they detecting asymptomatic infections too? What is the false positive and false negative rate of the type of testing Australia is doing, and how many people were being tested during this time? If some of the infections were asymptomatic, is it possible that some of them are false positives, and the fleeting encounter was also a false positive (either a false positive test, or that wasn't the true source of the infection) just due to random chance?
        • geolqued 5y ago
          Positives would be re-tested to rule out false positives. In that period 30k-60k people where being tested in NSW. https://www.covid19data.com.au/nsw https://www.covid19data.com.au/nsw
• taeric 5y ago
  Annoyingly, my intuitive impression is that we are still far more ignorant than we'd care to admit. Being in a place where we all willingly wear masks to grocery shop, I get the impression we are far more cautious than most places. Still, I expect it is just a matter of time before we are exposed. Why? I honestly don't know. It isn't lack of wanting to be safer. But it has gotten fatiguing to try to keep up with what makes us safer today. I remember the start when folks wiped down delivered groceries. Even isolated them for a few days. Nowadays, it seems masking is still the visible thing to do, but most seem pretty sure that it is the vaccination that will make a difference. Anything else is a slowdown, at best.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    I have had the flu twice. The first was in college and then second was when my kids were in pre-school/elementary school.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I think you mean "I have had flu-related symptoms twice". Given that influenza is a virus with a huge number of variations, and almost nobody is ever tested for infection with any of them, there's every chance that you've had many more influenza infections, but no symptoms.
      • sjg007 5y ago
        Nope these were confirmed cases.
        • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
          Yes, I understand that the times you had symptoms, the infection was confirmed to be flu. What wasn't tested (or detected) were the times when you were asymptommatic but still infected with one the many influenza variants. English is a little problematic when it comes to describing infectious disease. In all cases, there is the disease agent (e.g. an influenza virus) and there are the disease symptoms (e.g. "flu"). But we tend to say "I had the flu" without it being clear if we mean "the disease agent was present" or "i had the symptoms".
• themitigating 5y ago
  Getting vaccinated, staying isolated if you are infected, and wearing a mask all work related to that
• mlyle 5y ago
  I'm a teacher at a school. - We eat outside. - We have filters upgraded to MERV-13 and the fans run the entire school day. - We have windows and doors open on all classrooms, except for A) a few that don't open outside, or B) when it's rainy/windy to the point it's not possible. We have small, secondary HEPA filters that we run in those circumstances. (Often, we're blaring AC or heat into a room with all doors and windows open just to get a few degrees closer to comfort). - We mask indoors, too. So far, no secondary cases attributable to spread at school. We've had frequent testing for much of the time, too, so they'd likely get detected. Now a lot of the student body is vaccinated, too, but this dates to before that.
  • glial 5y ago
    This matches the policy at my children's school - and thankfully the outcome has been the same as well, with no community spread. These seem like reasonable and effective precautions to me.
  • YZF 5y ago
    That's awesome but why isn't it universal?
    • CivBase 5y ago
      In some places it's far too hot or cold most of the school year? Or inclement weather is common. Or students have severe alergies. Or there isn't enough space for school buildings to be designed that way. Or the local air/noise pollution is too great. It seems to me like the ability to design a school like this would be the exception, not the rule.
  • doubled112 5y ago
    My kid's school doesn't have windows that open. It's too new for that.
    • sjg007 5y ago
      Your kids school should have a good HVAC then which should run 24x7 and will have a fresh air intake which does the required number of air exchanges per hour. Add in some local air cleaners too.
• antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Viruses spread because of their hosts (us). In the past it was because of various sanitary conditions that allowed viruses to spread. Now that we have largely clean sanitation practices (showering, clean tap water, toilets), our practice of staying indoors and often in cramped places (elevators, transportation, work, school) is an easy way for a virus to chance on this way to spread.
  • jl2718 5y ago
    Future people: “You mean they just dumped their used air and everybody else had to breathe it in?”
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Some patterns become more evident when viewed with the perspective of time. There were numerous diseases that it's now clear probably had a very strong airborn-transmission component. Some we know of and their potential for transmission is extreme, e.g., smallpox. Turberculosis transmission all but certainly benefitted from cramped living, working, and travel conditions. Legionaire's disease was discovered in the 1970s, thriving in the cool, moist, air-conditioning ducts of a hotel (and affecting a convention of the American Legion, hence the name). "Seasonal" cold and flu are also all but certaily amplified by indoor living, working, shopping, and related activities. The impact of COVID-19 countermeasures in reducing their prevalence over the past two years has been profound. "Sick buildings" have been an issue since the 1970s (largely following increased energy-efficiency measures reducing air circulation), and there seem to be multiple components including chemicals in structural, decorative, and celaning/other materials. I predicted early into the Covid pandemic that changes to building construction, operations, and HVAC systems would likely be a lasting legacy of this pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires%27_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires%27_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome
• kingcharles 5y ago
  I got COVID when I was in jail. There is almost no air circulation in some jails, and a lot, like the ones I was in, are hermetically-sealed boxes. 40 people stood in a box the size of your living room. Breathe that COVID in, baby.