I was at a meeting here in Oakland the other day, one of those wonderful meetings about projects we have around here. There was food – good food, too, not just the usual pizza – and people who had critical things to say were careful in their phrasing.
(As a person who has developed a hatred of meetings after a lifetime of going to them, I am often pleasantly surprised by how good our meetings are in Oakland.)
But there was one thing: I had brought a CO2 meter, because I knew we would be meeting in a basement room, and over the course of the meeting it began to register not just high, but seriously high. I put on a mask, but finally decided to say something.
People were a little surprised, but we opened another door, and the reading dropped back into the good range.
And I realized that very few people are truly aware of the need for indoor air quality, even activists, and even people who are careful to mask in larger gatherings or on airplanes.
Now I’m not measuring CO2 for its own sake – though the higher the CO2 level in a room, the more it makes you drowsy and slows down your brain processing during the time you’re in that space – but as a proxy for the risk of getting Covid or another respiratory virus.
Those viruses are spread in the air, so if you’re sick and exhale – or cough or sneeze – you put the virus into the air. When CO2 levels get above 800, we’re breathing in each other’s lung exhalations, so if one person is sick, we’re all going to be exposed.
There are things you can do about this.
The simplest one is to put more air in the room – open a window or a door, if they are available in that space.
It is possible to put in a heating and air conditioning system that includes good ventilation and also has a filtration system that takes viruses and other particles out of the air. It’s not particularly new technology and if you’re putting in an overall system, it’s not all that expensive.
But it is a lot more expensive than doing nothing, so very few places have done it as a retrofit.
So opening the windows or doors is still the default most places.
There is something cheap and practical you can do in buildings that aren’t being retrofitted and don’t have much access to outside air: you can get an air filter. In fact, if money is a real issue, you can build one cheaply using a box fan and MERV 13 filters.
These are called Corsi-Rosenthal boxes after the engineers who came up with them. The instructions on how to build them are free and on their website.
There’s a lot more information on their website about the importance of indoor air quality. You might find their research page of interest.
But the key thing is that they remove a lot of the virus particles from the air. You have to replace the filters regularly, of course.
Of course, if you’re in a space with poor ventilation and no filtering system, you have to fall back on masks, preferably N95 or KN95 ones that fit well. I carry the CO2 meter so that I have a good idea of when I need to mask.*
Now there is a lot more we could do as a society to protect everyone from viruses. As most of us remember, some remarkable scientists were able to come up with effective vaccines against Covid in less than a year, and now that we understand how to use mRNA technology, we can make even more vaccines quickly.
But under the current administration, there’s no support for those vaccines, so no improvements are being made. There was good research at one point on a nasal spray vaccine that blocked transmission, but I haven’t heard anymore about it since the grifter took office.
So we can’t count on better vaccines or more treatments for Covid, flu, and other illnesses. That’s despite the fact that viruses are a great deal more serious than we are accustomed to thinking. Many long term illnesses come from exposure to things we think of as “just a cold.”
We don’t have to get sick all the time, don’t have to get all those viruses. But in the current situation, it’s on us to protect ourselves.
You don’t have to take my word for this. There’s a lot of information at the Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation website.
And the superb science writer Carl Zimmer wrote an excellent book about all this called Air-Borne. He delved into the history of measuring this and the reasons why airborne viruses have been ignored for so long as well as discussing the issues in Covid. He even gets into ultraviolet light, which is another way of destroying viruses and protecting ourselves.
Above all, I’d really like people to stop being so casual about getting sick all the time. It doesn’t have to be that way and it’s past time we stopped it.
*There are some nasal sprays, including at least one antihistamine spray, that some studies have shown reduces your chance of getting viruses, particularly Covid. However, while I use such things, I do not know nearly as much about them as I do about ventilation and filtration, and am not as certain about their value.