During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.
As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.
So when I stumbled on Carl Zimmer’s book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe while browsing in a bookstore, I was intrigued. I knew Zimmer was a science writer for The New York Times, and the book seemed to have thorough reporting.
What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”
I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.
And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.
I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.
The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.
Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit.
But the book doesn’t just look at the pandemic. It goes back through the history of contagious diseases, looking at the old ideas of “bad air” that were usually tied to dirty conditions and the advent of germ theory. A great deal of it goes into detail about the 20th Century scientists who conducted experiments to discover what got carried in the air and what diseases were spread that way – research that was snatched up by the government to develop biological weapons, rather than used to improve public health.
In the last chapters, where Zimmer interviews scientists who fought to get the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control to recognize that Covid was air-borne, I was surprised and pleased to discover just how many of those people I knew about. I had stumbled on their work – often on Twitter before it was ravaged by Elon Musk – as I searched for better information about the spread of the pandemic.
I knew about many of the studies and efforts Zimmer covered, though not all of them, since he had a great deal of information about Chinese and Australian work that I hadn’t known about. That he cited people like Joe Allen, Rich Corsi, and Linsey Marr made me realize he had found the good experts.
Zimmer writes in a reportorial style. He gives you facts that let you draw your own conclusions. And even when he clearly thinks one of the people he is writing about is right, he does let the reader know about that person’s flaws. The work is thorough.
He doesn’t go into detail about ventilation and filtration systems, mostly discussing the Corsi-Rosenthal box made from fans and filters, though he does provide some details on ultraviolet light. Far-UVC, a form of ultraviolet light made from krypton and chloride, produces light at 222 nanometers and unlike earlier versions, is not irritating to the eyes.
Using it in a club room in a bar was equivalent to 34 exchanges of air per hour in the room. Hospital operating rooms do 12 air changes per hour.
This isn’t a book about the pandemic per se. It’s about how people do science and the barriers that often keep the best ideas buried. But it’s a great reminder that we have the tools and the knowledge.
I don’t think we’d have had a political force working for good indoor air conditions even without the destructive regime now undermining some of our best systems, but in the current chaos it is even more unlikely.
But it still needs to happen and is something to push for when we get the chance. By looking at the history alongside the current science, Zimmer shows us what can be done. He’s provided us all with the core knowledge we need.