Posted on 10/03/2021 9:17:12 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
Before you read any further, take a long, slow, deep breath. Congratulations! If you’re sitting in a typical American home, office building, or school, about 3 percent of the air you breathed in recently came out of the lungs of the people in the room with you right now.
Breathing in one another’s air is kind of nasty when you think about it. We would never drink from the same cup of water that every one of our co-workers had just sipped out of. But something very similar happens all day long in our offices, schools, homes, buses, and even airplanes. All day, every day, we sit around breathing in what other people expel from their lungs. It’s the respiratory equivalent of drinking everyone else’s backwash.
The gross-out factor notwithstanding, inhaling someone else’s breath is not a big deal if they’re not sick. But if they’re actively infectious, they’re constantly releasing viruses packaged in small respiratory aerosols that form deep in the lungs.
How many pathogens you take in depends on one factor in particular: how much fresh air is coming into the building. Most buildings are poorly ventilated. But in a good building—that is, one designed to bring in significantly more outdoor air than building codes in the United States and elsewhere typically require—the proportion of indoor air that comes from other people’s lungs can be brought down to a level at which infection across the room is unlikely.
Throughout the 21st century, employers and commercial-real-estate developers have tried to make workplaces more attractive by adding showy amenities, such as gyms, coffee bars, and beanbag chairs, that supposedly foster creativity and cooperation and keep younger workers happy.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Sealed climate control didn’t cause COVID but it certainly did nothing to “stop the spread”.
If one puts too much effort into only breathing in ‘clean’ untainted air, that would weaken the system.
A little dirt in the body goes a long way to building good bacteria. To be antiseptically clean is not a normal existance, unless one has some severe immunity disease.
I.E. John Travolta in “Boy In A Bubble”.
When air enters somebody else’s lungs, it becomes tainted with the impurities found in those lungs. Tiny particles of nasty gunk actually become attached to the atoms of nitrogen and oxygen, at which point they get expelled, you breath them in, and get contaminated.
“ The gross-out factor notwithstanding…”
What? The Atlantic lets 12 year olds write their articles?
Riding around in a car with the windows up must be at least ten times worse than sitting in an office. Oh the horror! /s
This is probably some guy who has been wearing a mask for two years non stop.
I think he needs help.
Good point. Or a subway train, or an airline flight . . . .
“Employers Have Been Offering the Wrong Office Amenities (Workplaces need fresh air...”
Nice PIPE DREAM, but AOC has other plans with her Green New Deal. And those plans include tightly sealed buildings...and it didn’t start with her, which is why NYC cannot even have have ticker-tape parades anymore (even for Leftists), because the buildings are sealed.
What we need are “comfort women”.
Outside air brought into a typical office building is about 20%
max ventilation would be 100%
be ready to pay 2 or 3 times as much for heating and cooling it - after you replace the HVAC equipment not designed for 100% OA
I’m always amazed that many Silicon Valley companies offer sleeping pods in their facilities. Any I have seen are never used. They are always empty, which makes sense. Regardless that the company offers them, would you really want your boss walking by in the middle of the day and seeing you in a deep, drooling sleep?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.