Not surprising? HEPA filters have been known to be able to filter viruses for some time; it's maybe the main reason they were invented? Not sure about that though.
But come on, if anyone finds something that’s probably effective based on science and isn’t going to negatively affect anyone, let’s shout it from the rooftops. If schools had been given funding to improve air circulation and filtration as well as a local gym now does after a $500,000 upgrade, I’m sure many would feel better about sending their children to school.
An awful lot of our handling of COVID has been farcical (a year and a half in, we’re still relying on cloth masks and obsessively sanitizing surfaces), but in the case of schools it’s veered toward absurdist/tragic.
There’s nothing farcical about recommending cloth masks and surface cleaning during the first few months of the pandemic when nothing was known about how the virus spread and when masks needed to be reserved for those on the front lines.
The only farcical piece is how our society reacted to the recommendations of the experts.
That depends completely on where you live, there are plenty of places that still have indoor or outdoor mask mandates, despite them being completely useless.
My point remains.
That's why it's farcical. In my area, you're required to wear your mask when you enter a restaurant and keep it on until you reach your table. Employees spend 8 hours breathing in the building through a cloth mask. Many places are still serving using single-use dishware to "stop the spread". Many people are still walking around with gloves on.
I'm not saying these were bad recommendations at the time, but they've turned into talismans and rituals we do to ward off the evil spirit of COVID while people broadly go about their lives as before.
Meanwhile, things like updating and repairing HVAC systems or restructuring buildings to maximize airflow, which both actually address COVID and have actual positive effects on health and wellbeing get short shrift, because we're wearing masks, so we're safe, and doing real work is expensive.
Now this pandemic started around 2020, which is more than decade later.
So recommending cloth masks was and is indeed farcical. Doing it after recommending against mask usage is idiocy. And no, the world’s collective scientific understanding of masks didn’t change between 2020 and 2021.
We are required to have two HEPA filters always running in the classroom. They are loud. Combined with the fact that (1) children mumble, (2) the children have masks on, and (3) everyone is supposed to stay 3+ feet apart, it's quite hard to hear what a lot of kids are saying!
I don't know what the right answer is, but what we have now really sucks!
Speaking for many schools in heating dominated climates: renovate the what? (Many schools have forced water radiators, which are obviously not able to be retrofitted for effective air filtration.)
The one I have is loud enough on it's lowest setting that I don't like leaving it on in the background :(
That said the real failure was the FDA not making getting the vaccine approved for your 3rd graders by the start of the school year. Frankly I don't know how those guys can look themselves in the mirror while they are shaving in the morning.
I think vaccine approval for 5-11 year olds is coming in early November.
Kids have been separated from their parents due to increased evictions, their parents may not be able to work which means less money for food/clothing/services/healthcare, their parents & extended family are dying, their education has been impacted, and everyone has been going crazy from being cooped up with their families & not being able to play with friends or do extracurriculars.
also, you're already distancing (which is doing nearly all the work there) and wearing masks (which is mostly theater in a distanced classroom as well). the virus isn't free-floating live in the classroom. most virus falls to the ground directly. of what's aloft, it becomes inactivated pretty quickly for all sorts of reasons (dessication, ph, temperature, radiation, etc.) and most likely won't land anywhere near a viable infection spot. so almost no active virus is filtered out before it has a chance to reach a moist, viable passageway in another person.
even huge central commercial systems likely wouldn't filter out coronavirus before they die off or land somewhere harmlessly. it's another potential intervention that sounds plausible on the surface, but is mostly useless against covid.
1. Air purifiers don’t filter the air evenly (commercial ones since that’s the context). 2. Social distancing indoors is doing most of the work (ie is almost all that’s needed to stop the spread). 3. The virus isn’t free-floating live in the classroom
for instance, this study did not link air filtration to a reduction in transmission, only that a hepa+uv filter can reduce sars-cov-2 from known aerosolized air, basically an expected result in a controlled study (not “real-world”, as claimed).
We'd be in a lot better shape if we'd decided to actually do something instead of falling back on the usual learned helplessness.