Great post! I also believe in the need to get our air clean ASAP.
Self-promotion: check out SecureBio’s work on far-UVC. We will hopefully publish more write-ups soon.
Minor point: In an informal survey of experts in the field, most people preferred the term germicidal UV (GUV) over Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI). I also think that UVGI is a bit unwieldy, and “irradiation” sounds scary (although in Rethink Priorities’ survey on this, the name didn’t seem to matter much for people’s impressions of the technology).
Interesting observation: With indoor air cleaners, there doesn’t seem to be any real-world epidemiological evidence of whether they reduce infection rates (of course, on priors, I would expect them to). At least I didn’t find any studies when I looked into it a few months ago, which surprised me. Such data also doesn’t yet exist for far-UVC, but there is a bunch on conventional upper-room GUV (most of it decades old, though).
Also, I have a standing invitation for people to contact me if they are interested in working on GUV or far-UVC specifically and want to know what they could do!
Great post! I also believe in the need to get our air clean ASAP.
Self-promotion: check out SecureBio’s work on far-UVC. We will hopefully publish more write-ups soon.
Minor point: In an informal survey of experts in the field, most people preferred the term germicidal UV (GUV) over Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI). I also think that UVGI is a bit unwieldy, and “irradiation” sounds scary (although in Rethink Priorities’ survey on this, the name didn’t seem to matter much for people’s impressions of the technology).
Interesting observation: With indoor air cleaners, there doesn’t seem to be any real-world epidemiological evidence of whether they reduce infection rates (of course, on priors, I would expect them to). At least I didn’t find any studies when I looked into it a few months ago, which surprised me. Such data also doesn’t yet exist for far-UVC, but there is a bunch on conventional upper-room GUV (most of it decades old, though).
Good news on the regulation side: ASHRAE Commits to Developing an IAQ Pathogen Mitigation Standard. I’ll be curious to see what comes out of it.
Also, I have a standing invitation for people to contact me if they are interested in working on GUV or far-UVC specifically and want to know what they could do!