Here is my current frustration with all things covid. We seem to think, there are only two options for covid. Pretend it’s over, or “lockdown”.
In fact there are a number of options that would have a huge impact on improving everyone’s health from a wide range of respiratory diseases, and best of all we can implement many of these solutions without “infringing on anyones rights”.
I am glad to see the OSPE (of which I am a member) advocating again for clean indoor air. If you live in Ontario please check this out.
There is a lot of supporting science that cleaning the air we breathe will keep us healthier. I’d like to direct you to the work of Don Milton. There are many others in the field but Dr Milton has done some very important work. He is an MD and has a doctorate in Environmental Heath and teaches at Harvard. He has the cross disciplinary knowledge suited for mitigating an airborne pandemic.
In 2002, he and S Rudnick wrote a paper “Risk of indoor airborne infection transmission estimated from carbon dioxide concentration”, where they studied person to person transmission of infectious agents through recirculated air of modern office buildings.
What OSPE is advocating for is completely backed by years of science and is codified in the ASHRAE 241 standard.
With that foundation in science, I can say my experiences have lined up with the above data as well, which is always nice to see the correlation. This winter was the first one where we’ve had family in a retirement home. Prior to family moving in we investigated a number of retirement homes, all of which had implemented airborne precautions, and all of which claimed they had very few cases of covid.
Our experience the last couple months seems to confirm their claims. I know just from our ARANET CO2 measurements, the home is always under 550ppm of CO2 which indicates excellent ventilation. Any respiratory symptoms, they test for covid on the first day of symptoms and they test again a few days later. Other than a case here and there, there has not been any large outbreak of covid in the home, and its a fair sized facility with one tower being independent living and various levels of care in the second tower.
We could make dramatic improvements in children’s health by doing the same thing for schools, which in turn is going reduce community transmission as well. Same should be done work workplaces and indoor spaces we socialize in.
We apparently have billions for the new highway 413, what we would need for clean air would be a fraction of that.
