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.
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.