I am curious if the ambience air can be too "sterile", that we will come to find out there are some good microbes in the air that is beneficial to our health.
Viruses are also linked to all sorts of nasty outcomes like Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. I doubt we’ll have any means to knock transmission back a ton anytime soon but it’d be nice to do what we can.
With the Spanish flu in 1918 it took months for it to get around, mostly through rail and steam ships. With COVID-19 we saw some variants explode around the entire globe in a matter of _weeks_.
I spent a year on a rather isolated base on an island, with about 50 other people. Hygiene was certainly not as good as it is here in the civilised world as we often didn't have running water, ate wild meat that had simply been stored in the cold outside for days, food products with an expiration date a few years in the past, etc, and we just didn't get sick. We got sick when the supply ship came, though. It wasn't Antarctica either, the conditions are mostly similar to Northern Europe, not so different from Brittany.
I think the situation is quite similar to how humans lived for a long time, in small groups with only occasional contact with strangers, and in these conditions I'm sure infectious disease was much less common than it is now.
Of course disease did exist, but I think it would mostly have been diseases brought by insects or other vectors, not as much things like the flu or the common cold.
It's actually the exact opposite? Improved hygiene and vaccination means rates of illness have dropped.
Rawdogging unfiltered air with true COVID or other bad virons will expose you to a potentially harmful virus--millions of people have been killed and many more disabled from it so far. You have no way of knowing if you will join their fate and are just rolling the dice.
Go to southeast Asia where drinking water isn't so great. Drink it as a tourist and you'll spend a few days running to the toilet. But a native will drink it just fine as they're exposed to it all the time and their immune system has learned to deal with it.
Low level exposure is good for that, you will find germs everywhere, not enough to make you sick but enough to give your immune system a heads-up for when it does come across a high level source of them like a contagious carrier.
If you really believed this you would tell your surgeon not to bother wearing gloves or wash hands because you want to ensure your immune system is functioning ideally,
When the surgeon goes home on the metro he doesn't wear gloves either. Or a mask in many cases.
Of course living in a sterile environment works but the problem is that you will then have to do it all the time everywhere. Otherwise the first time you're out of that environment your immune system will have to catch up on everything. And there's a whole spectrum in between. Perfect "safety" is not possible while having an actual life.
The question is, does the covid pandemic indicate we should move towards the more sterile side of that spectrum? I personally don't think so, on the contrary. If you see the isolationist tactic employed by China it has been far less effective at getting the situation over with than our approach in the west. We were enjoying our lives for a year while the Chinese were still brutally locked up.
In the case of Southeast Asia, just getting used to the water is far more easily achieved than fixing it everywhere due to the high cost of a good water system. Some people get ill but life always carries risk. And for foreigners there's always bottled water. In our case we make a different tradeoff.
But training the immune system against common threats by exposing it to low level sources is really a thing. If it couldn't do that we would have been extinct millennia ago :) Because threats appear much faster than evolution can cope with them.
'Southeast Asia' doesn't make a trade-off because they analyzed the data and came to the conclusion that their population is better off with half-filtered water, they do it because they are poor and have bad infrastructure. Would you like their water supply so you can get your immune system trained? While at it maybe start eating unrefrigerated food. My friend from Africa did that growing up and has an iron stomach -- it sure does work (too bad about all the kids who died though because they got unlucky).
The problem isn't 'it doesn't work', the problem is 'you can't just get rid of the awful bad ones and leave the kinda bad ones. Either you do it or you don't.
This is why your type of argument is terrible.
I'm ok with the risk and I don't want to go everywhere masked (which I find really horrible for historical trauma reasons) or bother with ventilation and sterilisation stuff. I will never do that kind of stuff willingly.
If anything covid told me it's better not to be too fussy because it's over quickly (unlike China which really tried to kill it at all costs).
But when people say the immune system can't be trained by exposure I just have to disagree.
But anyway your mind is set and so is mine so there is no point in continuing.
So you are arguing because you feel like it is correct, based on nothing more than your own intuition.
> And the cost of those HVAC sterilisations will of course be paid by all of us (customers of venues, transport etc).
Are you willing to give up your nice clean water and get some 'southeastern asian' water to save a few cents? I mean, who cares how many people die from it, cause life is risky eh?