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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

This is literally everything that was needed: fans.

Businesses that upped their ventilation or provided outdoor seatings with plentiful airflow should have never been affected.

Sort of amazing I can still walk into a bathroom with completely stagnant air.

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Ventilation is required by code (International Residential Code and International Mechanical Code both lay out requirements for residential and commercial construction respectively). Any bathroom without either a window or mechanical ventilation is either legacy construction or somehow was built without regard to code e.g. unpermitted.

Windows are often left closed, in practice.

This seems like a massive logical jump? What evidence supports this argument?

Not necessarily high confidence but certainly worth exploring given the minuscule costs compared to many, many other expenses, a local school district bought classroom air filters for about $100k each and had dramatically lower COVID related absences than nearby county and city school districts that didn't have them.

$100k per classroom is significantly different from "fans". That's also an extremely privileged position, because most schools refuse to budget $20 a classroom for basic supplies like whiteboard markers.

I have no clue where the $100k per classroom number came from in the parent comment(each school maybe?), A Denver based project had an installed cost of less than $800 and a yearly energy cost of $361 per classroom.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90671889/covid-19-spurred-invest...

That's still significant, but good luck convincing the school board to do that instead of continuing to funnel money wherever they usually do instead of improving classrooms.

The $100k is one figure I saw for the whole district but looks like they got it for $20k list each for a stationary one according to this article https://www.nbc12.com/2021/09/16/manassas-public-schools-use...

Either of the models are more sophisticated than just extra fans and filters though

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