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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

A potentially fantastic outcome from all this is that many more public and private spaces will be designed and retrofitted with very good ventilation.

Beyond curbing the spread of natural airborne diseases, it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare.

And even beyond all that, we're becoming increasingly aware of how important clean air is for our overall health even without the risk of pathogens.

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I hope that's true. My experience so far has been pretty minor symbolic changes though. My employer sent emails about how they swapped their MERV filters for slightly better ones, and something hand-wavy about adjusting the external air percentage "when feasible" (with no numbers). I would be surprised if they do major retrofits, like a new heat exchange system allowing significantly higher percentage of outside air, at least as things currently stand.

I could see it happening in new buildings, though. Possibly in existing buildings if an easy-to-read summary number for ventilation became popular and the numbers for specific spaces became easy to find and widely publicized. Then companies might be willing to pay more to rent space with a higher "ventilation score", especially if employees balked at working in spaces with low scores.

Well, given that virus particles start to be meaningfully filtered only at a certain MERV level (14?), that upgrade may in fact have been more than a "minor symbolic" gesture.

MERV-13 is pretty good. Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up. It then comes down to how many air changes you can expect.

> Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up.

What means it's probably useless against any airbone virus. But it's pretty great against particle pollution, in case you want to use it in a private space.

Virus size is not the correct metric for a virus transmitted in aerosolized or droplet form (notably, COVID19). What matters is the aerosol/droplet size, which in this case is substantially above 1 micrometer.

Viruses don't circulate bare in the air. Droplets containing viruses do. It's thought that it's mostly carried within droplets that are 5um or larger.

Just in case smaller particles have a substantial role, I quoted the 1um number.

It will eventually become just another element in economic selection.

The wealthy and the high income earners will start avoiding buildings, businesses, and organizations that won't or can't sufficiently upgrade to be considered safe. Their money will flow and support the healthy/safe alternatives.

Those that are left behind will be the dregs that the poor and desperate use and will gradually fall into disrepair until their owners go bankrupt or give up and sell to someone who has the means and drive to upgrade or demolish and rebuild.

The same thing happens to any old infrastructure where people can vote with their feet.

It won't change my habits. I'm not going to ask every business owner to provide their facilities maintenance info before I go to a place of business. If I get sick I get sick. It may or may not be the fault of the business.

I wonder if it just gets built into health/building codes. I don't want to ask every business to do X and yet I hope sometimes regulators do.

I think the challenge with indoor air circulation is the energy required to do so, especially when heating/cooling of the air is involved.

But, I'd sure love better indoor air quality.

In the town where I live, office and apartment buildings are assigned letter codes based upon energy efficiency, which are then publicly displayed. It's not unfeasible to imagine that something like that could be done for the health and safety profile of buildings. Even if many people chose to ignore such information, I think enough would feel hesitant to enter a building with an "F" grade that it would end up having a positive effect overall.

What town/country?

A couple years ago I bought a CO2 meter, and was astonished to see it going over 1000ppm in my office. Since then, I always keep the window cracked, keeping the CO2 levels usually under 500.

The meter was one of the best investments I ever made.

Yeah when our office got those meters it suddenly explained why I got pounding headaches after long days. I'm pretty sensitive to it apparently. I've seen it go as high as 1400 :(

Cognitive performance starts declining at 1000 ppm.

Makes me wonder if the atmospheric increase from ~280ppm to the current 420ppm over the past 200 years is having some minor, but statistically significant effect on our collective cognition.

If it is, it's probably far overwhelmed by the shear weight of more well educated people and better tools at our disposal.

I've done the same recently for my home. It's tough to keep good interior air in the winter when the building is not designed for it.

Ha, at the University where I work, they are "upgrading" the windows to more energy efficient (good) but they will no longer be able to open up to the outside. All of the occupants complained, but sorry too late to change the plans, even though we don't have a contractor picked yet. We also have a relatively mild climate where opening the windows 10 months out of the year would insure adequate cooling.

> it also may decrease the attack vector in our societies for airborne bio-terrorism/warfare

Sounds extremely far-fetched. Any terrorist attack will be designed with the countermeasures in mind. Deploying enough biological agent to swamp the ventilation system would likely not be an issue.

I'm pretty certain I worked in an open-floor plan office that had windows designed to "impede" small airplanes being flown into it.

I speculate this fact -after- a someone actually did fly their airplane into our building. The pilot received exceptionally bad customer service from us and was attempting to kill one of our leaders.

Lesson learned: Don't give bad customer service if you work in the World Trade Center.

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