Getting Serious About Ventilation

Recent stories suggest that ventilators are not particularly effective in the fight against Covid-19. Many sick people placed on ventilators pass away. It’s impossible to know how these patients would have done without ventilators, since there is no control group. In addition to ventilators, we should seriously examine the ventilation capacity of hospitals and other large buildings.

Viral load is important. The amount of virus someone is exposed to can greatly affect how sick they become. This may be one reason more dense areas are suffering under a large number of cases and medical personnel are at such high risk.

Additionally, Covid-19 does appear to be airborne. This means it can spread through apartment buildings, between units that share ventilation systems or have other air transfer (if you can smell your neighbors cooking, then there is significant air pass through).

Although it seems that touching contaminated surfaces is a very significant risk, in theory touch based transfer can be controlled by disinfectant and hand sanitizer. By contrast, no mask is 100% effective against airborne particles (even N95 masks). Therefore, healthcare workers might be more at risk from airborne particles than contaminated surfaces.

With hospitals already crowded, their ventilation systems are already likely strained. Ventilation systems are designed to achieve a certain number of air changes per hour based on expected building capacity. I imagine hospitals are designed with a large number of air changes per hour in mind. In hospitals with old or inefficient ventilation systems, portable air purifiers or ad hoc ventilation measures may help decrease airborne viral load. In apartment buildings it may be helpful to open a window or run those systems connected to outside air on their highest settings.