Hi Josh — jumping in as the lead organizer for EA Global. While I think this could be interesting, as someone else commented I’m skeptical this would be worth it for an event lasting only three days, and would be more excited about people trialing this in office spaces or something else more permanent.
Additionally, taking a lot of these actions for a three day event would be quite logistically challenging (though not impossible). I’m not sure there’s a way to rent air filtration equipment and it would be non-trivial to buy it and then store it or give it away — and I doubt it would be worth convincing a venue to undergo construction work to install air filtration systems in the building. With a lot of household air purifiers (i.e., the ones you can get on Amazon), there are also trade-offs re noise pollution — with an event the size of EA Global, we’d need a lot of these, and altogether these could be quite loud. We very frequently get complaints that people can’t hear each other at our events, so this could make things even more problematic. This means that at the end of the day there are other marginal improvements to the conference I’m more excited about making.
It’s 3 days, but it’s hundreds of people mixing with people from all over (so high chance someone has something other people don’t), many of whom arrived in mass transit (last minute chance to catch something), are sleeping less and eating worse than normal (stressing the immune system), continuously talking in mostly crowded rooms (easy spreading).
Even if you don’t think covid is unusually dangerous, I think standard cold and flu risk, and the fact that high co2 reduces efficacy, justifies caring a lot about air quality.
I think we’d have to know how tractable improving air quality is (in terms of less spreading) to care about it a lot. Right now, at least from the OP it sounds experimental, as if the value of information is the main benefit.
Air quality is in a funny place where 1. directionally, it is clear that removing pathogens from the air is definitely helpful in reducing infection (also removing other pollutants is useful as well) but 2. the level of benefit requires further research to quantify (i.e. if you remove 99% of pathogens from the air every hour, we don’t know what % effect that will have on transmission). The benefit of piloting is A. it makes implementation and adoption much more efficient and convenient and B. it can generate evidence to help quantify the benefits.
That is all to say I think “we shouldn’t clean the air because we don’t know the impact of cleaning the air” ends up being a bit self-defeating (insofar as piloting air safety is the best way to generate evidence on the impact).
This is a problem where I think we can get some returns with minimal investment. For example, maybe just ask volunteers to bring in their air purifiers from home and hook them up during the day. That won’t be a perfect solution, but it will provide cleaner air than having no purifiers. This seems like a space where we can get something like logarithmic returns on effort, which means even doing a little can be quite impactful.
Hi Josh — jumping in as the lead organizer for EA Global. While I think this could be interesting, as someone else commented I’m skeptical this would be worth it for an event lasting only three days, and would be more excited about people trialing this in office spaces or something else more permanent.
Additionally, taking a lot of these actions for a three day event would be quite logistically challenging (though not impossible). I’m not sure there’s a way to rent air filtration equipment and it would be non-trivial to buy it and then store it or give it away — and I doubt it would be worth convincing a venue to undergo construction work to install air filtration systems in the building. With a lot of household air purifiers (i.e., the ones you can get on Amazon), there are also trade-offs re noise pollution — with an event the size of EA Global, we’d need a lot of these, and altogether these could be quite loud. We very frequently get complaints that people can’t hear each other at our events, so this could make things even more problematic. This means that at the end of the day there are other marginal improvements to the conference I’m more excited about making.
Convincing a venue to implement it well (or rewarding one that has already done that) will have benefits that last more than three days.
It’s 3 days, but it’s hundreds of people mixing with people from all over (so high chance someone has something other people don’t), many of whom arrived in mass transit (last minute chance to catch something), are sleeping less and eating worse than normal (stressing the immune system), continuously talking in mostly crowded rooms (easy spreading).
Even if you don’t think covid is unusually dangerous, I think standard cold and flu risk, and the fact that high co2 reduces efficacy, justifies caring a lot about air quality.
I think we’d have to know how tractable improving air quality is (in terms of less spreading) to care about it a lot. Right now, at least from the OP it sounds experimental, as if the value of information is the main benefit.
Air quality is in a funny place where 1. directionally, it is clear that removing pathogens from the air is definitely helpful in reducing infection (also removing other pollutants is useful as well) but 2. the level of benefit requires further research to quantify (i.e. if you remove 99% of pathogens from the air every hour, we don’t know what % effect that will have on transmission). The benefit of piloting is A. it makes implementation and adoption much more efficient and convenient and B. it can generate evidence to help quantify the benefits.
That is all to say I think “we shouldn’t clean the air because we don’t know the impact of cleaning the air” ends up being a bit self-defeating (insofar as piloting air safety is the best way to generate evidence on the impact).
This is a problem where I think we can get some returns with minimal investment. For example, maybe just ask volunteers to bring in their air purifiers from home and hook them up during the day. That won’t be a perfect solution, but it will provide cleaner air than having no purifiers. This seems like a space where we can get something like logarithmic returns on effort, which means even doing a little can be quite impactful.
Minor point, but I’ll note that most volunteers come from out of town, and I expect only a minority of them own air purifiers anyway.