Until the coronavirus has been defeated, we would ideally do much of our breathing outdoors. But at some point, we have to go back inside and face the question: Can we trust the air? JDavidsonNYC writes
We’ve removed our paywall from essential coronavirus news stories. Become a subscriber to support our journalists. Subscribe now.Breathe in, hoping that this next lungful is clear of noxious droplets. Breathe out so that whatever microbes you harbor dissipate in the breeze. Breathe in and figure that, if some unfortunate carrier coughed in the elevator you just entered, the virus will probably have escaped through the doors or settled on the floor.
“It’s frustrating that neither the CDC nor the WHO has issued guidance on the potential for airborne transmission, because our whole field has been talking about this since February,” says Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor of public health and co-author of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity. “There’s a strong likelihood it’s happening, and every new piece of evidence supports it, and so far nothing has refuted it.
During an ordinary summertime trip from my apartment to this magazine’s offices, I pass from my front door through a corridor with doors on both sides, an elevator, my building’s lobby, one overheated subway station, a blast-chilled subway car, a second overheated subway station, an underground passageway, an atrium, another elevator, and a corporate lobby, before arriving at a suite of open-plan rooms.
Prochner warns that air quality is unforgiving toward sloppiness and neglect. In the average office building, the air you exhale passes through ducts and plenums that haven’t been cleaned out in decades. Then those particulate-laden currents circulate back into the building for you to inhale again. “If a building owner puts in a brand-new filter but leaves gaps around the frame, then air is just bypassing the filter,” Prochner says.
Air shouldn’t be left solely to engineers. “The ability to breathe clean air freely is an architectural issue,” says architect Michael Murphy, the founder of MASS Design Group. “When you ask, Is the air around me going to infect me? that’s a paradigm shift in the way we understand space. Maybe this epidemic demands a return to the past, when cities were agents of a healthier life and design was about creating a healthier environment.
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