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This is crucial because a lot of the pushback against this infrastructure is from powerful interests, especially employers that don't want to pay to retrofit ventilation systems to help protect workers.Īs mentioned before in the example of the U.S., existing OSHA regulations on air quality are already insufficient. The WHO needs to call this what it is to provide backing for enhanced ventilation infrastructure and air quality monitoring. The facts have been clear for some time: the COVID-19 virus primarily spreads through the air via aerosols and not from surfaces. Gabby Stern, director of communications for the WHO, recently mentioned this in a tweet by bringing up the need for "a consensus on terminology."īut this semantic discussion is just bureaucratic inertia that is not helping the situation. One of the main roadblocks right now is within the scientific community, which is stuck on a semantic discussion on what "airborne" actually means. (For context, air quality with carbon dioxide of 1150ppm or less is considered ideal for indoor spaces). However, this is not just a problem in Ireland but indeed all over the world.įor example, the United States' Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a set Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) for carbon dioxide of 5,000 parts per million (ppm) (0.5 percent carbon dioxide in air) averaged over an eight-hour work day. This highlights that COVID-19 is indeed airborne and spread by inhaling infected air – not from contacting surfaces – and speaks to a problem with building ventilation. Ireland is an interesting case study on ventilation because half of the people who died from COVID-19 were infected in fewer than 400 buildings, even though there are over 2.5 million buildings in the country. Interestingly, the editorial criticized public health officials by saying that "almost two years into a pandemic caused by an airborne virus, ministers seldom even talk about ventilation." On November 20 the Irish Times published an editorial, saying that the country's COVID-19 surge is not reaching a crisis – but that it is already a crisis. More specifically, how buildings are ventilated. However, one quite simple but hugely important area has not had the focus it deserves: buildings. But it also involves information, such as intergovernmental data sharing, systems of international coordination and contact tracing infrastructure. Pandemic infrastructure has mainly been focused on supply chains for medical supplies, including personal protective equipment, therapeutic medicines and vaccines.