Andrew Nikiforuk writes that we still haven't learned important lessons from COVID:
The past tells us plagues generally end messily; conclude at different times for different classes and regions; and don’t fade into obscurity until something dramatically changes in the ecology of the pathogen’s transmission or how people live alongside the disease.
Charles Forsberg, an MIT nuclear engineer, laid out this truth in a rousing article in Mechanical Engineering magazine.
“Historical amnesia” is what Forsberg called the general assumption that plagues are short-term events conquered by vaccines and drugs.
History, he wrote, “has shown that most diseases are stopped by shutting down disease transmission, not late-arriving vaccines or hospital treatments, and that the most enduring way to stop transmission is via engineered public health systems such as water treatment plants and mosquito control districts.”
In other words, plagues don’t tend to end until their human hosts re-engineer the environment that allows them to thrive.
What must we do?
From Forsberg’s perspective the only way to close the door on this pandemic is to provide “clean air the way engineered systems supply clean water.”
Forsberg is not alone in this blunt and practical assessment. Thousands of engineers and physicists who understand air chemistry now support better indoor air filtration and ventilation as our way out of relentless viral waves and chronic hospitalizations.
One civil engineer, Richard Corsi, who has spent his life trying to improve indoor air quality, even designed a $60 box fan that draws circulating air through filters as a pandemic fighter. Thousands of citizens have built them. And yes they work.
The virus wasn’t being spread by heavy droplets as the medical establishment first believed, but light aerosols that floated through a room like a fog or smoke. In fact schools equipped with good mechanical ventilation can reduce viral transmission by 74 per cent found one recent Italian study.
The complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam also recognized earlier than most public health experts the importance for focusing on critical parameters such as clean air, testing and masks, which act as individual air filters. Why? Because all have ability to choke viral transmission if scaled up properly.
The clear air movement has begun to make progress. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers has published a document calling for better air quality as an effective means of reducing viral transmission.
The government of France ordered new CO2 standards for school classrooms, because high CO2 levels not only indicate low air exchange but also high COVID levels.
Coincidentally, a research paper by Harvard medical school’s Edward Goldstein released last month and not yet peer reviewed concludes that in France “children between the ages of 10 and 19 years played the greatest relative role in propagating Omicron epidemics, particularly when schools were open.”
Indoor air expert Corsi, now dean of engineering at UC Davis, believes that vaccines and anti-virals are really important. “But this pandemic is not going anywhere until we get serious about lowering the inhalation dose, folks,” he recently tweeted.
“Doing so is not rocket science. It’s technically simple and just a matter of human will.”
We've known for decades that illness thrives in dirty water. COVID thrives in dirty air.
Image: First Call
12 comments:
Instead of all the debate about cleaning and treating inside air we should be talking exclusively about not making the outside air so toxic.
There's a lot that needs to be done about the outside air, too, zoombats.
Mitigation solutions abound, Owen, for Covid and the other things plaguing our world. Unfortunately, many nation-states prefer funding military efforts rather than measures that truly protect their citizens.
In 1998 I toured an house built to R2000 standards which included an air-to-air heat exchange mechanism which kept circulating fresh air. Proven designs such as these have been around for at least 25 years yet most housing construction follows regulations that were long out-dated in the last century. Safe air systems should be in every building.
Demonstrating one's power seems to always trump the public good, Lorne.
This is not new technology, Toby. We have the tools to deal with COVID. The problem is we refuse to use them.
SARS arrived in both Toronto and Vancouver in winter 2003.
In BC, we have a PHO (Bonnie Henry) who was a veteran of that poorly managed SARs outbreak in 2003 in Toronto.
The BC PHO in 2003 managed to catch it before it spread. Very dumb of BC (can't even blame bad luck) to make Henry the BC PHO, an act of mirthless irony. She is one of the deniers re airborne transmission and won't strongly recommend masks let alone bring in a mask mandate for crowded public spaces.
She has claimed that school transmission is not a problem ... belying a report from her own office that 80% of BC school children infected. (Higher than the adult rate.) Still no ventilation upgrades or masks in BC schools.
Europe is installing CO2 monitors, HEPA filters etc in schools, based on studies that show their efficacy.
John Snow removed the handle of the Broad St water-well pump in London 1854 to stop cholera.
We don't really need new tech or ideas. We need better leaders.
ditto on climate change
If they use new techniques or as you write techniques which have been around for some time, it will cost money and game rules might have to be changed. some people don't like that.
Many of today's buildings are "sealed" and fresh/clean air is in short supply. If air from the outside isn't brought in or the air kept clean any "germs" in the air will continue to spread and if there isn't air exchange, the number of "germs" just keep increasing. As some one wrote here in B.C. it would be helpful if they simply opened windows in class rooms, but in many buildings they are sealed shut.
That's the point, PoV. We need better leaders.
Fresh air should be free, e.a.f. That's a non-starter.
“Historical amnesia” is what Forsberg called the general assumption that plagues are short-term events conquered by vaccines and drugs.
While everything I have read recently about Covid-19 supports the transmission by aerosols, I think the professor missed a couple of history lessons. Believe it or not, vaccines seem to have reduced or eliminated smallpox, measles and polio.
I can very, very faintly remember the last Canadian polio epidemic. We have not seen one since the arrival of polio vaccines. Ditto for measles even though it is a wildly contagious airborne disease.
We need all the tools available.
I agree, jrk. And history proves that vaccines are indispensable.
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