“By contrast, airborne pathogens and respiratory infections, whether seasonal influenza or Covid-19, are addressed fairly weakly, if at all, in terms of regulations, standards, and building design and operation, pertaining to the air we breathe.” “Governments have for decades promulgated a large amount of legislation and invested heavily in food safety, sanitation, and drinking water for public health purposes,” Morawska and her co-authors write. Last week, Morawska and a few dozen other air quality experts put out a manifesto of sorts in Science, calling for “a paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection.” Eventually, the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognized this more explicitly in their scientific guidance.īut when the pandemic is over, we’ll still need better ventilation to prevent future outbreaks of respiratory diseases including coronaviruses, but also the cold and flu. Ventilation works by either replacing stale, potentially infectious air with fresh clean outdoor, or passing that stale air through a filter.Įarlier in the pandemic, Morawska led a group of air quality experts who asked the WHO to recognize that the coronavirus can spread in aerosols across long distances (as opposed to just occurring in close contact situations of 6 feet or less). The pandemic has made clear we can be infected with respiratory viruses more easily in poorly ventilated spaces, where the virus people are breathing out of their nose and mouth can linger in the air longer. And it’s not just up to individuals to demand better air quality - governments and engineering associations need to set new standards to ensure clean air for all. We should expect to breathe in clean, virus-free air just like we should expect to get clean water in a glass. And not just of restaurant owners, but of the managers of the crowded indoor spaces we visit. In the post-pandemic world, Morawska wants all of us to ask the question - “what’s the ventilation like in here?” - more often. But yet, many waiters - at least before the Covid-19 pandemic hit - were forced to breathe poorly ventilated air in restaurants and other indoor spaces where people packed together.Īnd still today, “if anybody asks a restaurant owner, ‘what’s the ventilation here?’ they will probably look strangely at them,” says Lidia Morawska, a physicist and an aerosol expert at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has advised the World Health Organization on the spread of airborne pathogens. If a waiter at a restaurant brought you a murky, stinky glass of water, that would be unacceptable.
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