US CDC sets first federal target for ventilation of indoor air to lower risk
cnn.com
cnn.com
Not only would it have helped with that pandemic, and future ones, but would probably save more lives and productivity than any other use of money, dollar for dollar.
Ok I do understand why. But I will never understand why we accept corporate lobbying that distracts the government away from public interest and towards private and exclusive profits.
Unfortunately, people are too ignorant to organize for their own good. We can't even agree on what that means, and in fact the majority would rather fight against their own interests in exchange for silly platitudes.
Energy, food, materials, and all things managed by logistics rely on economic activity.
To downplay the importance of the economy betrays little consideration to all aspects of our civilization.
"During covid, the only voices that got heard were those of companies"
So you're saying nobody heard BLM and Antifa during the "summer of love" mostly-peaceful riots?
Considering BLM got $90MM (to mostly buy mansions in two countries and employ Cullors' family), I'd say they were heard well.
And people who got extended economic benefits, not heard? huh?
And the states that got virtual blank Treasury checks to buy PPE, vents, ambulances, and everything in between...
"would rather fight against their own interests"
Who are you to tell other people what their interests are? That bit is simple arrogance. You can only ever speak for yourself.
One thing I will note is that America seems to like to do a lot of tyranny of the majority kind of moves.
Instead of saying things like "We recommend isolation and will support you through it if you choose" it becomes "You cannot leave your house because half of you said so".
or instead of "You can have an abortion but we wont pay for it" it becomes a tug of war between "You cannot have an abortion, even if you'll pay" or "You can have an abortion and we'll make the tax payer subsidize/pay for it" ...
I'm often shocked by the kind of "Freedom" that Americans accept
Now there are (for now, expensive) drugs to help people do that.
The real issue is that human attention isn't great when bad things are spread out. School shootings get a lot of attention. They're scary, it's one single event, etc. Yet kids are far, far more likely to die from many other things that we could prevent.
For instance, in 2020 220 children under the age of 14 died due to drunk drivers: https://www.nhtsa.gov/driving-drunk-or-high-puts-everyone-da...
Clean water used to be controversial decades ago, but is now considered essential.
Decades from now, I predict that clean air will be considered essential also.
And just as there are mandates (not recommendations) for clean water, so too do I expect that sooner or later we will have mandates for clean air. With corresponding boost to public health.
This Supreme Court is hostile to regulations and precedent.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-supreme-court...
The rest is opinions about that finding.
And it's pretty clear that congress has pretty well abdicated its responsibilities...
The supreme court could have abolished the EPA and this statement would still be true. They simply ruled it, no politics happening here!
It is completely meaningless to discuss the supreme court without discussing the actual circumstances of the cases and the precedents set by their rulings.
Disagree? Just ask Kavanaugh w.r.t. their clean water act ruling, which of course just simply ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority:
> The majority had “rewritten the Clean Water Act” and ignored its text as well as “45 years of consistent agency practice,” Kavanaugh wrote.
> The statutory text, Kavanaugh wrote, “does not require a continuous surface connection between those wetlands and covered waters.”
> By narrowing the (Clean Water) Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/supreme-court-wetlan...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/supreme-court-curtails-cl...
John Snow traced a cholera outbreak to contaminated water from a particular water pump, the Broad Street pump.
The pump handle was temporarily removed, which stopped people from drinking the contamined water, and so reduced illness.
But once the immediate crisis had passed, the pump handle was replaced:
> After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street pump handle. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-faecal method of transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate.
It took another few years until there was agreement to build the London sewer system.
Before then, the River Thames was essentially an open sewer.
To be fair, I can see the analogies to the air systems. I just hesitate to think that "clean water" was a controversy.
So even though they knew the water made people ill, it didn't visually appear dirty, and so there was reluctance to clean the water.
Ditto now for air.
So the situation is analogous: back then, it was controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the water (since many falsely thought it was already clean). Now, it is controversial to introduce the steps required to clean the air (since many falsely think that it is already clean).
Note, please don't take my post here as argument against having targets for ventilation. I don't intend it that way. I do think many people over state the dangers of in house stoves and such. I also have no problem saying that we have advanced enough that well ventilated house should be the default.
Stated differently. I have no problem mandating child seats. I do wish the safety comparisons for them wasn't to "someone completely unbuckled in the vehicle." So, for air, I do not argue against better codes for ventilation. I also don't expect it to have an impact on my life. My last house didn't even have forced air anything, whereas my current house does. I feel basically the same between the two. Such that all of the stories of ventilation being a miracle cure rub me very much the wrong way.
I am primarily thinking of "dirty air" in the context of airborne diseases (e.g., Covid and flu).
This can be any enclosed indoor place with people and without mitigations, i.e., doesn't require wildfires or stoves.
The mitigations to clean this indoor "dirty air" can be either replacing with outdoor air, or directly "cleaning" by removing or inactivating the disease particles (e.g., with HEPA filters / UVGI).
Note that it is easy to believe most claims, except schools stand in the way. The outlandish claims that so many have held about the magic of ... well, anything, seems to fall in the face of why it didn't demolish schools. It clearly spread through the schools. Just as I have friends where it hit their family, but didn't spread to us this round. Somehow. I don't think I can credit good hygiene for my family. Certainly not the 5yo.
Again, I'm all for ventilation standards. They certainly shouldn't make things worse. By all reasoning, they should make things better. Claims against Covid/Flu, though, I take with some salt right now. I'm hopeful, but not sure I'm expecting anything there.
Amidst all the noise, my understanding of the key points is:
- We know that airborne diseases primarily spread indoors
- We know that we can clean the air, and that cleaning the air reduces disease spread
Putting the two together, I believe that cleaning the air can improve public health.
I don't expect most diseases to disappear entirely. But I do expect a dramatic reduction.
Analogy: like cholera. It hasn't disappeared entirely, but I don't personally need to think about it during my day-to-day life because the incidence rate is now so low.
My takeaway was that evidence-free predictions should be treated differently to evidence-based predictions.
Besides, humans and our ancestors have spent millions of years exposed to all sorts of things. It is why we have an immune system.
The rise of respiratory pathogens corresponds with dense cities, which are only a few thousand years old. This is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
This is different for humans than for bats, which co-evolved for millions of years with such pathogens.
Long story-- the house is comfortable, yes, but we also just don't get nearly as much transmission of viruses between the family. Of course plenty of colds get passed around with 2 adults and 3 kids, but anecdotally we just seem to be way less sick and rarely all sick at once.
My alertness level is also never an issue like I remember it being, but I have made many other lifestyle changes which could be having an impact on that.
Could you share?
The most likely reason that had a big impact was that I am not sitting on the couch and thus not snacking late at night...
I credit a general acceptance that if you’re sick you stay at home, and mask wearing.
There are a further ~10 full circulations of internal air through the full filtering system.
That level of air movement remains comfortable because we have a lot of ducting (we detailed in a lot of grilles, not just one single one per room) so it is a low-velocity high throughput system. You never get a lot of air blowing out of one place, but you get a lot of placed blowing a little air.
Businesses that upped their ventilation or provided outdoor seatings with plentiful airflow should have never been affected.
Sort of amazing I can still walk into a bathroom with completely stagnant air.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90671889/covid-19-spurred-invest...
Either of the models are more sophisticated than just extra fans and filters though
Note that when they say "5 ACH" they include both actual air changes and "effective air changes" due to filtration or germicidal UV:
"Some air cleaning and air treatment devices do not bring in outdoor air. Instead, they clean or treat the indoor air to reduce the concentration of infectious particles. Thus, they give eACH without the need or expense of conditioning outdoor air."
For my small, crowded house, at least.
Nope. This is an updated regulation due to Covid-19. Better to have it than not, of course, but it takes them 3 years?
The disconnect was there even in the use of scientific terms. Infection-control experts have long drawn a hard line between droplet viruses and airborne ones, seeing only the latter as capable of travelling far and lingering in the air. “Dogmatic bias is certainly a big part of it,” says Don Milton, an occupational-health physician who studies aerosol transmission of infectious diseases
in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, ... The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports “opinion pieces”. Instead, they concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent”.
The cautious thing would be to encourage masking and improved ventilation.
Still, other health organizations moved faster than the WHO despite the uncertainty. In February 2020, ... At Li’s suggestion, he says, the centre recommended maximizing airflow in buildings from the outside, to help flush out any airborne contagion. At the time, Li didn’t think that ventilation would substantially reduce infection ... “I always support a precautionary approach,” he says.
FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne. - WHO, March 2020 https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898
https://www.atlenv.com/building-ventilation-the-proper-air-c...
https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...
Some exposure to 'unclean' environments can be beneficial. This is a topic discussed in books like "Dirt is Good" and is part of the Hygeine Hypothesis that states that over sanitization has negative consequences for our immune systems.
We could be trading a reduction in some illnesses, likely respiratory viruses, with increases in asthma, allergies, and other conditions especially if this were widely applied.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-power-of-...
> A study last summer found that open windows in classrooms can have up to a 14.1 fold reduction in COVID19 transmission.
> Another study found that one HEPA filter is as effective as two windows partly open all day during the winter (2.5-fold decrease in transmission). Two HEPA filters are even more effective (4-fold decrease in transmission).
* https://www.ashrae.org/technical-resources/bookstore/standar...
Does this add to that?
The CDC targets are just a suggestion at this point but they are likely just the first step in retrofitting existing buildings.
[1] Ventilation Through The Years: A Perspective https://www.aivc.org/sites/default/files/airbase_12483.pdf
As far as I can tell, neither Massachusetts nor my city have incorporated ASHRAE 62 into their codes. (ASHRAE 90.1-2013 is required in MA for commercial buildings, but those relate to energy efficiency, not air quality.)
There are two big problems with doing this: allergies and temperature. I think both of these problems are resolved when you simply acclimatize people to outdoor air. Maybe people spend few years uncomfortable until their body gets used to it (and until people learn how to dress appropriately for the season) but in the end we'll all be healthier if we're breathing fresh air instead of stale recycled air.
It turns out that, despite their government lunacy, most of us survived.
This appears in direct opposition to newer building codes to reduce energy usage.
If you do want to bring in outside air, you can use a heat exchange system to minimize the energy impact.
Some of these systems have been known to have heat exchange efficiencies as high as 70-80% while others have as low as 50%
It is subjective and anecdotal, but I am now more productive and I sleep better with a bunch of ERVs installed in my house.
What a load of shit.
The best preventive measure was not letting it leak out of your bio weapons lab.
10. Should indoor temperature and humidity be used to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ventilat...
Their answer is a cop-out, but light years ahead of anyone else.