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. Continue reading “Avoiding Viruses”…