Reminder, folks: the COVID19 pandemic is NOT over, it's just that the big commercial landlords decided it was hurting their business rents so leaned hard on the politicians and media to SAY that it's over.
Right now China is in the FO phase of FAFO, and involuntarily providing an amplifier for a new extra-virulent strain that'll make an end run around our half-assed vaccines AGAIN.
Stay safe in 2023!
I will add that masking/distancing/vaccination is all good, but what we REALLY need is forced PM2.5 air filtration in all public spaces. Schools, hospitals, universities, shops, restaurants, cinemas: on trains, buses, planes, and passenger ships. And ESPECIALLY schools and hospitals. These premises have always been viral disease amplifiers, but filtration stops it spreading at source.
But DO we need them? There was a wildly cited paper recommending HEPA filters, but this was based on lab results, ie, theoretical.
Here in #Ontario, the province promised all school rooms would have a filtre, but my repeated asking if this was done was never answered. One teacher did confirm their school had them, but I'm unable to find any follow up studies to see if these had any measurable impact.
Do you know of any such studies?
@teledyn @cstross @pluralistic "A MERV 13 filter must remove at least 50% of particles between 0.3 and 1 μm, 85% from 1 – 3 μm and 90% from 3 – 10 μm."
By ANSI/ASHRAE standard
"The virus is 0.1 μm (micrometers), but it is NOT naked in the air. The typical respiratory aerosol that contains viruses and is generated when talking is ~3 μm.
And in any case all filters work well at 0.1 μm, because brownian motion helps a lot for filters to capture small aerosol."
Most anything you'd like to know about this can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fB5pysccOHvxphpTmCG_TGdytavMmc1cUumn8m0pwzo/edit
Written by a great group of professors.
The only part I'm (still) looking for is "Did it work?" 😏
Specifically in schools, but any will do.
@cstross @pluralistic @teledyn
Ok, so clearly I’m misunderstanding you then. Of course it filters out viruses. That’s not, scientifically speaking, a question. It’s just physics.
“HEPA filters are no less than 99.97% efficient at capturing human-generated viral particles associated with SARS-CoV-2.” - The CDC
I'm not sure how to be more clear. I have no doubts the specs of the machine, but when deployed it is not on lab conditions, it is in a institutional space, and as we all know, theory and practice are different things.
It would seem a simple matter, especially as these, if they were given to all schools, were not deployed at the same time. So was it 5% of a solution, 45%, 0.05%...
But clearly you don't much care, so I'll drop it and keep looking for the followup.
@teledyn @cstross @pluralistic
Here's hospital data:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.16.21263684v1
But you're not going to find the type of "real world" study I believe you're looking for. It's just not ethical to infect a control group of kids.
@BE
I believe I mentioned that filtres were not rolled out instantaneously, thus control groups. This is, in fact, how mask effacy was confirmed. No privacy risks.
But privacy raises another curio. Here in Ontario we were not given local "heat maps" during the pandemic because, they say, our density is so small, one could figure out individuals from the aggregate stat. Thus the maps put a big dot over Hearst, as if the risk was the same whether Toronto or Gravenhurst.
@cstross @pluralistic