Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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londons_explore

Fungal spores spread almost entirely through airflow.

COVID 19 also spread almost entirely through airflow.

I think we have an airflow problem in our hospitals (and other public places)

Luckily, that's quite cheap to fix. HEPA filtration is sufficient for both problems (no need to bring outdoor air in).

We should probably be:

* Mandating that all hospitals filter all air every 10 minutes. That could be simply a matter of buying bedside standalone air filters for every bed. They aren't medical devices, so will probably cost <$20 per bed, available from Amazon tomorrow.

* Start a study of air refreshes per hour Vs infection rate for various airborne pathogens. These studies typically can't be done for ethics reasons today - it wouldn't meet ethics standards to deliberately infect someone with something harmful. However this is happening hundreds of millions of times per year already, so I think it is in everyone's best interests to do the science to understand it so we can prevent disease spread.

> These studies typically can't be done for ethics reasons today - it wouldn't meet ethics standards to deliberately infect someone with something harmful.

You don't need to deliberately infect people.

Right now hospital air is not being filtered anywhere as far as I Understand.

You could start installing air filters in hospitals and have some other hospitals as a control group.

You closely monitor how much air is filtered, which filters are in use, and leave some hospitals unfiltered.

You might find out that filtering works. Or only certain filters work. Or that filtering spreads disease through air movement.

Or a mix of these, maybe disease x goes down while y goes up.

> Or that filtering spreads disease through air movement.

And the possibility of this would be what wouldn't pass any ethics committee...

True that.

A little crazy that more wasn't done towards this end in summer 2020 when there was massive amounts of cash available to the hospital system, comparatively very low occupancy such that retrofitting would be less disruptive (lower respiratory disease burden generally inclusive both of COVID and non-COVID due to lockdown measures), and the social will to solve it wasn't politicized in the US or attached to other hot button stuff. I don't really know enough about HVAC to know what it would take to improve the modal old hospital's ventilation so maybe this is an orders of magnitude tougher problem than I expect or something.

Hospitals already won't do incredibly simple and effective things like copper plating handrails and doorknobs because it costs literally anything and they aren't required to.

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