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).
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).