8 ms·

The thing is, I’m not sure preventing the spread is realistic. Unless you move to the country or to outer space, and never receive any mail or goods, you will a

by Day1 5y ago

The thing is, I’m not sure preventing the spread is realistic. Unless you move to the country or to outer space, and never receive any mail or goods, you will always be in contact with, or in the vicinity of, something that has been in contact with, or in the vicinity of, someone else.

guelo 5y ago
It's not that hard. The risk is highest when we have these waves from new variants. There are forecasts that predict them with weeks lead time. And then the wave comes and goes over a few weeks. You just have to up your defenses during those weeks.
marricks 5y ago
It wasn't always the case. Time and time again the US government in particular chose the economy over people's lives. Or even people's live over having to do something. Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdowns. Many many countries covered pay for folks to stay home. The US initially had a lock down then just quit acting really. Sure, preventing ANYONE from getting COVID was unrealistically, but preventing most people from getting it was always possible.
- kaesar14 5y ago
  I don't want to live in a country where the government enforced wide-reaching shutdowns of businesses and quarantined people forcibly in their homes like China and Taiwan do. I think it's a violation of my civil liberties.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    This is the reasoning that leads to absurd levels of death we've seen over the last two years. It's great for you, no doubt, but incredibly selfish.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      We're not going to do perpetual lockdowns for the rest of eternity and not every country in the world is capable of enforcing a lockdown like China and the rest of East Asia anyway. It was always going to spread. Easy for the laptop class of this website to call not wanting lockdowns selfish when it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society.
      - sweetheart 5y ago
        > it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society. So does dying from Covid, or getting sick numerous times and missing work. Or not being able to afford missing work so you go in anyway and spread the disease, leading to your work being shutdown for weeks. No matter what is done, the poorest and most vulnerable will be disproportionally affected. While I agree we can't perpetually mandate stay-at-home orders and expect everyone to live off savings, we _can_ expect the gov't to make that possible beyond the pathetic payments that folks received.
    - noxer 5y ago
      There are no absurd levels of death. Average COVID death per day since the outbreak is likely lower than the average death from cigarette smoking. And people die from cigarette smoking since years and years. Million in the last decade in the US alone. And there is no doubt that cigarette smoking also increased COVID death. Another way to look it it is birth rate versus death rate. Globally speaking COVID death would need to be at lest one order of magnitude higher to stagnant growth. The 2 year pandemic made the global world population lag by about a week. So in a week we have the same number of people as we would have today if there were no COVID. Its that insignificant. On a population chart over 100 years COVID will be p much invisible, a tiny tiny slow down of the growth. There are no absurd levels of death there are just many many humans and thus the death number feel subjectively high.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      According to the CDC 1,027 people / 1000k died in 2020 compared to 870 people /100k in 2019. +157/100k (18%) is definitely more, but not an absurd amount more. I believe our response was appropriate.
  - guelo 5y ago
    You don't want to live in a country with mass disabilities either.
  - GiorgioG 5y ago
    Your civil liberties don't give you a right to get other people sick. My son's a type 1 diabetic (this isn't a matter of diet, exercise - that's type 2 diabetes.) Diabetics are at higher risk for complications from COVID. It pisses me off that people like you (and there are a lot of you) think it's your right to do what you please because it's inconvenient to wear masks, quarantine, social distance, etc. There are a lot of people at risk. Don't be a selfish prick.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      My civil liberties give me the right to leave my house and for people to have businesses and for me to visit those businesses. Perpetual lockdowns are a losing battle.
    - pomdapi 5y ago
      IMHO, there's two ways to look at that problem : protect the fragile, or restrain the non-fragile. And I'm in the same boat as your son. The current policies in the west have done nothing to proactively protect the fragile, and everything to restrain the non-fragile. As an example of what I mean : I spent a couple of lockdowns in a relatively poor country (Serbia) which for example allowed the 60+, fragile and immunocompromised exclusive access to shops, malls and other commerce until 9, a 30 minute pause to ventilate with nobody inside, and then normal access for the rest of the population. Subsidised delivery services were organised, etc. 16 hospitals with 900 ICU bed each (pop 6 million) were built chinese-style in 6 months, so the local healthcare system could go back to normal. Also, health insurance has a basic public option, with price-controlled drugs, generally 10-15x smaller than the US retail price, even for US-made drugs, new or old. Watching the US figuratively struggle for air for two years has been quite demoralizing.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I’m with you: I much prefer the USA’s response to China’s. However, if COVID turned out to be worse and I felt my and my family’s life were in danger, I would expect (and demand) that level of lockdown here at least.
    - secabeen 5y ago
      COVID is pretty bad. We are having a 9/11-equivalent number of deaths every day.
      - verdverm 5y ago
        You may wish to review the numbers you are stating comparisons about. The rate for COVID per day in the US is about 1300 (911k / 700 days). The total is about 9000 per day, which is 3x 9/11 every day https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
        noxer 5y ago
        You must look at excess death not death in total.
        verdverm 5y ago
        1300/day is roughly the excess. You need to compare it to normal (expected) total. excluding comparisons means you cannot judge severity one way or another. Basic stats here
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Yes, and our response was pretty strong. How does my comment run counter to that? If it were even worse than it was, a Chinese-level lockdown response would have been necessary, but it wasn't, at least here in the USA.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - heyoni 5y ago
    Protecting people from financial misery in order to isolate is the path we took and completely half assed it. There was never a moment when police were instructed to harass people for being outside, or not wearing a mask. Now if you have something against government mandating that businesses operate within certain safety parameters then I’ve got news for you….
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > I think it's a violation of my civil liberties. As an immunocompromised person, and considering the ADA, I'm of the opinion that some mitigation strategies, like required masking in the grocery store, help preserve my civil liberties and should be considered reasonable accommodations. Given our civil liberties conflict, you wind up in a tough to resolve scenario.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      I said forced shutdowns of businesses and forced quarantine at home like East Asian countries. Not masking.
    - nostrebored 5y ago
      Your 'civil liberties' are arguing for positive rights, which are fundamentally different than advocating for existing negative rights. Positive rights are your assertion that you have the right to action from another group. In general, medicine is one area where positive and negative rights conflict regularly. For example, imagine abortion, assisted suicide, or emergency care during a pandemic. Some of these are solved by employment contracts -- as an ER doctor you are accepting to be bound by people's positive right to emergency medical care. However, your assertion is that society et large should be bound by your positive right. You should have a very strong case for this. Do you?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > You should have a very strong case for this. Do you? In the US, we've made this call already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
        nostrebored 5y ago
        This is neither an employer-employee relationship nor an accessibility requirement. You know this because you did not have an established mask mandate or legal requirements for facilities to validate that patrons were not ill. Either of these would infringe on the rights of other groups. Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks. The other route of validating that customers are not sick would paradoxically infringe on the rights of the immunosuppressed.
  - managerclass 5y ago
    Contact tracing, heavy testing would've been a good happy medium. It don't have to be all or nothing.
  - throwhauser 5y ago
    If a lockdown and travel restrictions, with limited duration, could have contained the spread of COVID or some other disease, I don't think it's an unreasonable impingement on civil liberties. Practically speaking a few weeks of restrictions every few decades shouldn't be problematic, or at least much less problematic than something like wartime restrictions. Of course the value of any lockdown policy is contingent on the practical ability to correctly assess the threat of a new disease early enough that such short-duration, non-pharmaceutical interventions could work. But I don't think temporary restrictions are incompatible with basic civil liberties. EDIT: Removed amateur-hour epidemiology, restated "philosophical" argument contingent on NPIs being effective.
- managerclass 5y ago
  Contact tracing at the very least. It controls spread while allow places to stay open. Seems like the US just threw up their hands and decided that it was too difficult logistically and alternating between partial lockdowns and letting people who whatever.
- JSavageOne 5y ago
  > Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdown I was in South Korea from March-June 2020, there was no lockdown in South Korea. The only serious restriction was the 2 week quarantine required to enter the country. Businesses and everything were open just as usual - I was eating out at restaurants and working out of coffee shops everyday. Hell I even went to an amusement park one day (ok that did end up shutting down a week or two later when it was discovered that someone who had tested positive had been there). Meanwhile my family in the U.S were under lockdown not allowed to leave the house without an excuse deemed acceptable by the government, shocked that South Korea was life as usual despite having such a low case count.
  - calyth2018 5y ago
    I do recall reading that South Korea does not kid around with it's contact tracing, which was the reason why it went from flareups with the night club patrons, to having things under control. In comparison, countries like Canada (which I'm in) and US, does a half-hearted job in contact tracing. We rolled out the COVID Alert app, which is supposed to balance privacy concerns with the need for contact tracing, but now with Omicron burning through all the provinces, most have shifted to only PCR testing people in high-risk groups. And having a PCR testing from public health is the only way to get the one time key to fire off the alerts. North America could barely get masks going, paid lip service to contact tracing...
    - nostrebored 5y ago
      South Korea released propaganda, which you bought, and are still buying years after seeing empirically that it makes no sense. Australia implemented absolutely dystopian contact tracing decisions, countrywide lockdowns, left its citizens abroad, and it's still clear that every single person in that country is going to get COVID. It will be endemic, just like it is everywhere else. Even worse, the country has by-and-large taken a vaccine which gives them resistance to a spike protein that is not the most common in today's COVID cases. Recent (simian) experimentation has shown that the Omicron booster is not effective for previously vaccinated individuals. You will not see long term differences in outcomes between Canada, the US, and countries like South Korea or Australia. Our measures did not work, do not work, and are exclusively security theater. Countries which 'have things under control' are either extremely ruthless in their lockdown and travel approach, and have deferred pain, or are lying on the numbers.
ajross 5y ago
> I’m not sure preventing the spread is realistic. South Korea has a total confirmed case rate 10x lower than the USA, and a death rate 20x lower. It's absolutely realistic. It just requires serious effort on the part of everyone to follow straightforward rules about testing/tracing/mitigation. Korea hasn't been shut down for two years. They've just been smarter about it.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Care to compare the average BMI of citizens of both countries, a known major factor in someone getting sick. Having a lower BMI protects more against this disease than being vaccinated. Its know fact that Europeans were immune to some of the diseases they brought to America that nearly wiped out Native Americans. Therefore its not unreasonable to think that different populations will have different levels of response to a disease. Perhaps South Koreans were more likely to be exposed to similar enough corona viruses in the past to garner them enough protection this time.
  - ajross 5y ago
    > Care to compare This fallacy is distressingly common. That's not the way logic works. The contention above was that it was impossible to mitigate the spread of covid. I provided an existence proof that it was not. It's not on me to refute every contradicting hypothesis. It's clear that Korea did something right, and people interested in techniques to fight the virus would do best to study those actions instead of make excuses for why it must have been something else. As far as natural population immunity though: that's just wrong. It's a novel virus (c.f. the initial outbreak in a nearby east asian nation), everyone gets it. Korea has absolutely had rapid outbreaks too (the church group got a ton of press early) that show that covid can spread rapidly there. They just handled it better.
adrr 5y ago
Studies aren’t the best but it looks like vaccination significantly reduces the risk of these issues. Just hold off infections till the population can get vaccinated. Bigger issue is getting people to vaccinate especially since long Covid will cost billions in increased insurance premiums and Medicare costs.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Even that Antarctic research station that's the next best thing to the moon, staffed 100% by scientists and professionals who take it seriously and did everything better than any of us do, evereyone got it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I suspect there's at least one thing that Antarctica does worse than everyone else: air supply. I suspect they recycle their air really heavily, to minimize the energy cost of heating up outside air. But that matters for the spread of something like Covid. I'm guessing. I don't know. If anyone has actual information, feel free to jump in...
  - chucksta 5y ago
    Well that's generally how heat exchangers work, for that reason, even in temperate climates. I know there are some standards for recycling air in public buildings such as schools, and air born sickness seems like something they would have to worry about normally, so I would imagine they were pretty prepared for that aspect I skimmed this but didn't really see much past the actual heat source https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-scientists-warm-in-antarctica/ https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-sc...

by Day1 5y ago

guelo 5y ago

It's not that hard. The risk is highest when we have these waves from new variants. There are forecasts that predict them with weeks lead time. And then the wave comes and goes over a few weeks. You just have to up your defenses during those weeks.

marricks 5y ago

It wasn't always the case. Time and time again the US government in particular chose the economy over people's lives. Or even people's live over having to do something. Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdowns. Many many countries covered pay for folks to stay home. The US initially had a lock down then just quit acting really. Sure, preventing ANYONE from getting COVID was unrealistically, but preventing most people from getting it was always possible.

kaesar14 5y ago
I don't want to live in a country where the government enforced wide-reaching shutdowns of businesses and quarantined people forcibly in their homes like China and Taiwan do. I think it's a violation of my civil liberties.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  This is the reasoning that leads to absurd levels of death we've seen over the last two years. It's great for you, no doubt, but incredibly selfish.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    We're not going to do perpetual lockdowns for the rest of eternity and not every country in the world is capable of enforcing a lockdown like China and the rest of East Asia anyway. It was always going to spread. Easy for the laptop class of this website to call not wanting lockdowns selfish when it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society.
    - sweetheart 5y ago
      > it disproportionally harms the poorest and most vulnerable of our society. So does dying from Covid, or getting sick numerous times and missing work. Or not being able to afford missing work so you go in anyway and spread the disease, leading to your work being shutdown for weeks. No matter what is done, the poorest and most vulnerable will be disproportionally affected. While I agree we can't perpetually mandate stay-at-home orders and expect everyone to live off savings, we _can_ expect the gov't to make that possible beyond the pathetic payments that folks received.
  - noxer 5y ago
    There are no absurd levels of death. Average COVID death per day since the outbreak is likely lower than the average death from cigarette smoking. And people die from cigarette smoking since years and years. Million in the last decade in the US alone. And there is no doubt that cigarette smoking also increased COVID death. Another way to look it it is birth rate versus death rate. Globally speaking COVID death would need to be at lest one order of magnitude higher to stagnant growth. The 2 year pandemic made the global world population lag by about a week. So in a week we have the same number of people as we would have today if there were no COVID. Its that insignificant. On a population chart over 100 years COVID will be p much invisible, a tiny tiny slow down of the growth. There are no absurd levels of death there are just many many humans and thus the death number feel subjectively high.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    According to the CDC 1,027 people / 1000k died in 2020 compared to 870 people /100k in 2019. +157/100k (18%) is definitely more, but not an absurd amount more. I believe our response was appropriate.
- guelo 5y ago
  You don't want to live in a country with mass disabilities either.
- GiorgioG 5y ago
  Your civil liberties don't give you a right to get other people sick. My son's a type 1 diabetic (this isn't a matter of diet, exercise - that's type 2 diabetes.) Diabetics are at higher risk for complications from COVID. It pisses me off that people like you (and there are a lot of you) think it's your right to do what you please because it's inconvenient to wear masks, quarantine, social distance, etc. There are a lot of people at risk. Don't be a selfish prick.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    My civil liberties give me the right to leave my house and for people to have businesses and for me to visit those businesses. Perpetual lockdowns are a losing battle.
  - pomdapi 5y ago
    IMHO, there's two ways to look at that problem : protect the fragile, or restrain the non-fragile. And I'm in the same boat as your son. The current policies in the west have done nothing to proactively protect the fragile, and everything to restrain the non-fragile. As an example of what I mean : I spent a couple of lockdowns in a relatively poor country (Serbia) which for example allowed the 60+, fragile and immunocompromised exclusive access to shops, malls and other commerce until 9, a 30 minute pause to ventilate with nobody inside, and then normal access for the rest of the population. Subsidised delivery services were organised, etc. 16 hospitals with 900 ICU bed each (pop 6 million) were built chinese-style in 6 months, so the local healthcare system could go back to normal. Also, health insurance has a basic public option, with price-controlled drugs, generally 10-15x smaller than the US retail price, even for US-made drugs, new or old. Watching the US figuratively struggle for air for two years has been quite demoralizing.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I’m with you: I much prefer the USA’s response to China’s. However, if COVID turned out to be worse and I felt my and my family’s life were in danger, I would expect (and demand) that level of lockdown here at least.
  - secabeen 5y ago
    COVID is pretty bad. We are having a 9/11-equivalent number of deaths every day.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      You may wish to review the numbers you are stating comparisons about. The rate for COVID per day in the US is about 1300 (911k / 700 days). The total is about 9000 per day, which is 3x 9/11 every day https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
      - noxer 5y ago
        You must look at excess death not death in total.
        verdverm 5y ago
        1300/day is roughly the excess. You need to compare it to normal (expected) total. excluding comparisons means you cannot judge severity one way or another. Basic stats here
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Yes, and our response was pretty strong. How does my comment run counter to that? If it were even worse than it was, a Chinese-level lockdown response would have been necessary, but it wasn't, at least here in the USA.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- heyoni 5y ago
  Protecting people from financial misery in order to isolate is the path we took and completely half assed it. There was never a moment when police were instructed to harass people for being outside, or not wearing a mask. Now if you have something against government mandating that businesses operate within certain safety parameters then I’ve got news for you….
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > I think it's a violation of my civil liberties. As an immunocompromised person, and considering the ADA, I'm of the opinion that some mitigation strategies, like required masking in the grocery store, help preserve my civil liberties and should be considered reasonable accommodations. Given our civil liberties conflict, you wind up in a tough to resolve scenario.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    I said forced shutdowns of businesses and forced quarantine at home like East Asian countries. Not masking.
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    Your 'civil liberties' are arguing for positive rights, which are fundamentally different than advocating for existing negative rights. Positive rights are your assertion that you have the right to action from another group. In general, medicine is one area where positive and negative rights conflict regularly. For example, imagine abortion, assisted suicide, or emergency care during a pandemic. Some of these are solved by employment contracts -- as an ER doctor you are accepting to be bound by people's positive right to emergency medical care. However, your assertion is that society et large should be bound by your positive right. You should have a very strong case for this. Do you?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > You should have a very strong case for this. Do you? In the US, we've made this call already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
      - nostrebored 5y ago
        This is neither an employer-employee relationship nor an accessibility requirement. You know this because you did not have an established mask mandate or legal requirements for facilities to validate that patrons were not ill. Either of these would infringe on the rights of other groups. Like it or not, there are established groups of people who are unable to wear masks. The other route of validating that customers are not sick would paradoxically infringe on the rights of the immunosuppressed.
- managerclass 5y ago
  Contact tracing, heavy testing would've been a good happy medium. It don't have to be all or nothing.
- throwhauser 5y ago
  If a lockdown and travel restrictions, with limited duration, could have contained the spread of COVID or some other disease, I don't think it's an unreasonable impingement on civil liberties. Practically speaking a few weeks of restrictions every few decades shouldn't be problematic, or at least much less problematic than something like wartime restrictions. Of course the value of any lockdown policy is contingent on the practical ability to correctly assess the threat of a new disease early enough that such short-duration, non-pharmaceutical interventions could work. But I don't think temporary restrictions are incompatible with basic civil liberties. EDIT: Removed amateur-hour epidemiology, restated "philosophical" argument contingent on NPIs being effective.
managerclass 5y ago
Contact tracing at the very least. It controls spread while allow places to stay open. Seems like the US just threw up their hands and decided that it was too difficult logistically and alternating between partial lockdowns and letting people who whatever.
JSavageOne 5y ago
> Counties like S. Korea, had bold actions like contact tracing and lockdown I was in South Korea from March-June 2020, there was no lockdown in South Korea. The only serious restriction was the 2 week quarantine required to enter the country. Businesses and everything were open just as usual - I was eating out at restaurants and working out of coffee shops everyday. Hell I even went to an amusement park one day (ok that did end up shutting down a week or two later when it was discovered that someone who had tested positive had been there). Meanwhile my family in the U.S were under lockdown not allowed to leave the house without an excuse deemed acceptable by the government, shocked that South Korea was life as usual despite having such a low case count.
- calyth2018 5y ago
  I do recall reading that South Korea does not kid around with it's contact tracing, which was the reason why it went from flareups with the night club patrons, to having things under control. In comparison, countries like Canada (which I'm in) and US, does a half-hearted job in contact tracing. We rolled out the COVID Alert app, which is supposed to balance privacy concerns with the need for contact tracing, but now with Omicron burning through all the provinces, most have shifted to only PCR testing people in high-risk groups. And having a PCR testing from public health is the only way to get the one time key to fire off the alerts. North America could barely get masks going, paid lip service to contact tracing...
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    South Korea released propaganda, which you bought, and are still buying years after seeing empirically that it makes no sense. Australia implemented absolutely dystopian contact tracing decisions, countrywide lockdowns, left its citizens abroad, and it's still clear that every single person in that country is going to get COVID. It will be endemic, just like it is everywhere else. Even worse, the country has by-and-large taken a vaccine which gives them resistance to a spike protein that is not the most common in today's COVID cases. Recent (simian) experimentation has shown that the Omicron booster is not effective for previously vaccinated individuals. You will not see long term differences in outcomes between Canada, the US, and countries like South Korea or Australia. Our measures did not work, do not work, and are exclusively security theater. Countries which 'have things under control' are either extremely ruthless in their lockdown and travel approach, and have deferred pain, or are lying on the numbers.

ajross 5y ago

> I’m not sure preventing the spread is realistic. South Korea has a total confirmed case rate 10x lower than the USA, and a death rate 20x lower. It's absolutely realistic. It just requires serious effort on the part of everyone to follow straightforward rules about testing/tracing/mitigation. Korea hasn't been shut down for two years. They've just been smarter about it.

dukeofdoom 5y ago
Care to compare the average BMI of citizens of both countries, a known major factor in someone getting sick. Having a lower BMI protects more against this disease than being vaccinated. Its know fact that Europeans were immune to some of the diseases they brought to America that nearly wiped out Native Americans. Therefore its not unreasonable to think that different populations will have different levels of response to a disease. Perhaps South Koreans were more likely to be exposed to similar enough corona viruses in the past to garner them enough protection this time.
- ajross 5y ago
  > Care to compare This fallacy is distressingly common. That's not the way logic works. The contention above was that it was impossible to mitigate the spread of covid. I provided an existence proof that it was not. It's not on me to refute every contradicting hypothesis. It's clear that Korea did something right, and people interested in techniques to fight the virus would do best to study those actions instead of make excuses for why it must have been something else. As far as natural population immunity though: that's just wrong. It's a novel virus (c.f. the initial outbreak in a nearby east asian nation), everyone gets it. Korea has absolutely had rapid outbreaks too (the church group got a ton of press early) that show that covid can spread rapidly there. They just handled it better.

adrr 5y ago

Studies aren’t the best but it looks like vaccination significantly reduces the risk of these issues. Just hold off infections till the population can get vaccinated. Bigger issue is getting people to vaccinate especially since long Covid will cost billions in increased insurance premiums and Medicare costs.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Even that Antarctic research station that's the next best thing to the moon, staffed 100% by scientists and professionals who take it seriously and did everything better than any of us do, evereyone got it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I suspect there's at least one thing that Antarctica does worse than everyone else: air supply. I suspect they recycle their air really heavily, to minimize the energy cost of heating up outside air. But that matters for the spread of something like Covid. I'm guessing. I don't know. If anyone has actual information, feel free to jump in...
- chucksta 5y ago
  Well that's generally how heat exchangers work, for that reason, even in temperate climates. I know there are some standards for recycling air in public buildings such as schools, and air born sickness seems like something they would have to worry about normally, so I would imagine they were pretty prepared for that aspect I skimmed this but didn't really see much past the actual heat source https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-scientists-warm-in-antarctica/ https://www.cibsejournal.com/general/life-support-keeping-sc...