The First Four Healthy Building Strategies Every Building Should Pursue to Reduce Risk from Covid-19
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The Lancet Covid-19 Commission
Task Force on Safe Work, Safe School, Safe Travel
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1. Commission (give your building a tune-up) 2. Maximize outdoor air 3. Upgrade filtration 4. Supplement with portable air cleaners
1. Commission or Recommission Building Systems
2. Maximize outdoor air
3. Upgrade Air Filters to MERV13
4. Supplement with portable air cleaners, where needed
The #FirstFour represent key actions that represent the most effective, fundamental steps toward promoting healthier indoor environments and reducing the risk of airborne infectious disease transmission indoors.
Why act?
--> Airborne transmission is the dominant mode of transmission
--> Reducing inhalation exposure reduces risk
--> Ventilation and filtration are key strategies
-->There are benefits beyond COVID-19
In @AMJPublicHealth I make an argument that adding in an economic lens is good public health practice, and I leverage an excellent article by @celinegounder and @Craig_A_Spencer.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, the then-new field of IAQ generated research documenting that ventilation rates above this minimum standard were associated with many health benefits.
Throughout the 1990s to 2000s, research efforts were also underway to evaluate—and expand—the understanding and value proposition of better indoor air quality.
The triple-digit temps in the southwest are catching headlines ("Record-breaking heat wave expected to extend stay in the West"). Dangerous heat, for sure, but, if you look at wet-bulb, you'll see that the headlines should be about the heat wave in the West **AND** Florida🧵
How we talk about hot weather is seriously flawed. As heat waves become more intense and more frequent because of climate change, we need to change the way we think about outdoor temperatures.
We’re looking at the wrong measurement. What matters is not how hot the air is but how hot the weather is to a human body. For that, we need “wet-bulb globe temperature.”
In my Editorial for @AMJPublicHealth on the history of ventilation, I share a story not many people know...
--> In late 2020, the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force convened a group of experts and gave them an explicit task of making recommendations on ventilation rate targets...
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This team submitted their first recommendations to the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force in 2021...
...but the recommendations were never released to the public.
In the fall of 2022, the Lancet COVID-19 Commission released a report which revealed to the public the previously unreleased recommendations made by ASHRAE’s internal committee.
The history of ventilation is fraught, indeed. And it hasn't been told through a public health lens. I was invited to write an Editorial for @AMJPublicHealth. My reflections on how we got here, and what needs to happen next.
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We are in the sick building era, ushered in by a historic mistake in the 1970s with the promulgation of a standard that lowered ventilation rates in nearly every building we spend our time, and which represented a gross departure from earlier health-focused higher ventilation targets.
The year 2020 marked a major turning point in the history of ventilation. SARS-CoV-2, spread predominantly indoors, found an ally in buildings designed to minimal “acceptable” ventilation standards.
This is bad public health. "Everyone stay indoors after 6pm for the next six weeks" (also happens to be the absolute nicest time of year in Massachusetts...) Totally unrealistic, totally unnecessary, and also will just be ignored, anyway.
We used CFD modeling to evaluate the effectiveness of portable air cleaners to help remove airborne pathogens and mitigate disease transmission in schools
[tl/dr: portable air cleaners work]
THREAD
Portable air cleaners work!
We found that portable air cleaners w a clean air flow rate of 2.6 h−1 reduce mean aerosol intake of all students by up to 66%
Air mixing matters!
**A key benefit of using PACs is to facilitate
air mixing and movement in indoor environments with inadequate ventilation**