Thread by @ePatientDave

Listen my children and you shall hear
How a proactive patient, informed and with fear
Can still get the COVIDs when warned by his gear
By nonetheless thinking "It can't happen here."

I circulated this to a college alumni circle & @PaulFLevy urged me to fess up broadly. It's embarrassing & true & underscores that THIS SCIENCE STUFF ACTUALLY MATTERS. And there are idiots who are unable to avoid endangering us because they get hired by slacker companies. OK:

I travel with a CO2 meter, to detect when I'm in spaces that have stupidly bad ventilation. Brought it with me Thursday on a road trip to visit college friends.

CO2 <1000 is generally considered good ventilation, and when I see 2,000 it means either the facility is unable to bring in fresh air or they're just not interested.

Or they could be just stupid, but we'll get to that later.

At our Thursday night hotel, a Sheraton Four Points, our meter said >2,200. "Dang," I said, "the AC must be set to recirculate, not Vent."
But there was no available adjustment in the room.

I went to the hotel desk and asked. The site engineer said "Yeah, we have it all set to recirculate, to save energy." [Insert hair-on-fire emoji.]

But because we were bushed, WE ELECTED NOT TO EVACUATE.

We have seen such bad air before and not gotten infected.

Bad, bad anti-science thinking.

So I sat in that recirculating cesspool of air for 12 hours.

The next day before checkout (and before any symptoms) I talked again to the engineer, who responded to my CO2 meter data by saying "Look we have carbon monoxide alarms all through the hotel and they never go off."

MONoxide. Genius air quality guy.

The evening after arrival (2 days after exposure) a cough starts. Next morning rapid test confirms it.

Nothing's as ironic as a nerd (me) with an instrument whose warning he chooses to ignore, right?

The corker: today I reported it all to the county health dept, who thanked me and said "If we get any more reported cases we'll go suggest that they change it."

I said "There's no standard for ventilation??" "No, sir, there's not."

We truly are on our own, folks. YOU truly are on your own. To inform ourselves, be aware, and most of all to TAKE ACTION when we get warnings.

And I say that straight into the mirror.

I'm writing this 5 days after exposure; I'm mostly ok. Yay for Paxlovid; no I didn't get "Paxlovid mouth"; yay also to cough medicine, because aside from exhaustion, cough's been my main annoyance, and CVS solved that. We're heading home tomorrow.

IFL Science. Don't ignore it.

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