Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but the implication in the title is that the indoor air at EAG was somehow unsafe.
I don’t want people to get that impression, or in the worst case, avoid EAG because they think the air is unsafe.
Venues that have hosted EAG have commercial ventilation. These spaces provide at least a continuous 20 cfm per person of filtered, conditioned air, and the committee that sets those standards is acutely aware of the tradeoff between energy use from higher ventilation rates and health.
There is far greater risk from indoor house after-parties, as older residential homes don’t have ventilation and even if they do they were never designed to handle that many people.
We could ask the venue to make sure the filters on the air handlers were changed recently. And/or sprinkle in-room air cleaners throughout the meeting areas. People that have a much lower risk tolerance should just wear masks.
Sorry, that was not my intention: I’m not at all casting aspersions on EA Global or claiming that EA Global is less safe than other conferences or average spaces with commercial ventilation. I just think we can do better, and this is a worthy challenge to take on.
Another way of stating my intuition here (apart from the view that piloting indoor air safety interventions has a unique value at this moment in time) is that 1. EA spaces should make a deliberate effort to vacuum out infectious disease risk from the community* rather than be a passive medium through which infection spreads and 2. that this risk vacuum norm would be a good one to model for other spaces/actors to adopt.
*By which I mean something vaguely like either: 1. in a world with optimal indoor air safety measures, someone’s presence in an EA space should not increase the risk of respiratory disease transmission vs. their presence in a comparable space, 2. spending time in this space should reduce the risk of transmitting infection vs. other ways a person could spend their time, or 3. assuming it were possible to establish how spending time in different spaces contributed to transmitting respiratory infection and a risk budget for daily life could be created such that the effective rate of transmission for (all?) respiratory infection were below ~0.9, spending time in this space would not spend a person’s budget at a rate greater than other social behavior.
Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but the implication in the title is that the indoor air at EAG was somehow unsafe.
I don’t want people to get that impression, or in the worst case, avoid EAG because they think the air is unsafe.
Venues that have hosted EAG have commercial ventilation. These spaces provide at least a continuous 20 cfm per person of filtered, conditioned air, and the committee that sets those standards is acutely aware of the tradeoff between energy use from higher ventilation rates and health.
There is far greater risk from indoor house after-parties, as older residential homes don’t have ventilation and even if they do they were never designed to handle that many people.
We could ask the venue to make sure the filters on the air handlers were changed recently. And/or sprinkle in-room air cleaners throughout the meeting areas. People that have a much lower risk tolerance should just wear masks.
Sorry, that was not my intention: I’m not at all casting aspersions on EA Global or claiming that EA Global is less safe than other conferences or average spaces with commercial ventilation. I just think we can do better, and this is a worthy challenge to take on.
Another way of stating my intuition here (apart from the view that piloting indoor air safety interventions has a unique value at this moment in time) is that 1. EA spaces should make a deliberate effort to vacuum out infectious disease risk from the community* rather than be a passive medium through which infection spreads and 2. that this risk vacuum norm would be a good one to model for other spaces/actors to adopt.
*By which I mean something vaguely like either: 1. in a world with optimal indoor air safety measures, someone’s presence in an EA space should not increase the risk of respiratory disease transmission vs. their presence in a comparable space, 2. spending time in this space should reduce the risk of transmitting infection vs. other ways a person could spend their time, or 3. assuming it were possible to establish how spending time in different spaces contributed to transmitting respiratory infection and a risk budget for daily life could be created such that the effective rate of transmission for (all?) respiratory infection were below ~0.9, spending time in this space would not spend a person’s budget at a rate greater than other social behavior.