COVID risk mitigation

Indoors are still risky.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00810-9

This is troubling, to me:

One of the problems is that governments and businesses are still spending millions of dollars on surface disinfection, says Jimenez, despite evidence that it is rare for SARS-CoV-2 to pass from one person to another through contaminated surfaces. By contrast, few countries have invested in measures to improve indoor air quality.

Might invest in a CO2 monitor. Pretty cheap on amazon.
I mean, I’m in my tiny office, though overnight I keep the window open.

It’s one of the reasons that Jimenez and others advocate the use of inexpensive CO2 monitors as a rough measure of whether ventilation is adequate or not. As virus-carrying aerosols are exhaled, so too is CO2. And when ventilation is poor, CO2 accumulates along with the virus, says Jimenez. In an unreviewed analysis5, Jimenez and his co-author Zhe Peng found that SARS-CoV-2 infection risk rises along with CO2 concentrations indoors.

Taiwan, Norway and Portugal have laws that limit indoor CO2 to 1,000 p.p.m. Studies in California6 and Madrid7 show that CO2 levels in school classrooms frequently exceed this level. High levels have been linked to poorer mental concentration and more sick days6.

Setting clear CO2 limits would help to ensure that ventilation is adequate to reduce infection risk, says Jimenez. But his work suggests that in general 700 p.p.m. would be a better limit, and lower limits should apply to gyms and other venues where people expel greater volumes of air.

Suggest changing thread title to “COVID Risk Mitigations” . . . that seems to be more of the point of the OP and can help keep discussion from diverging into discussions of COVID risks themselves (which there are other threads for that topic).

:nerd_face:

Done.

Now, about those shittily ventilated schools…

…so then it would be interesting to look at the impact that COVID-19 had on those countries. I don’t know where to look offhand. Obviously, a google search is in order.

Obviously^2, the spread of COVID-19 is a multi-variate model, but can we eke out any inferences of how much the limit on indoor CO2 has helped?

Well, I don’t think CO2 and COVID are directly linked.
High levels of CO2 in an otherwise non-polluting area infers that there is little circulation of the air.
And little circulation in the air seems (to me) a huge factor in COVID transmission, in areas with lots of people.

I mean, if I’m all alone in my little bedroom-office with the door and window closed, I’m guessing the CO2 level will be higher than normal. If I’m at the local grocery store (or worse, am the local grocery store manager) and the CO2 level is higher than normal, I’d probably avoid it. How would I ever know, though?

Using CO2 levels as a proxy for “air quality” from ventilation filtering would only make sense in an area that generally sees “high volume” of human traffic.

Anyone have a good recommendation for one?

This one seems perfectly cromulent. Good to great reviews (only 28, though), about $100 with free delivery thru WalMart.
https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3688066584964179578?q=co2+monitor&safe=active&rlz=1C1GCEB_enUS908US908&biw=1163&bih=554&output=search&prds=eto:6529500410546733461_0,rsk:PC_5619609689053796117

But, I’m just shopping. I’d want to be able to take it with me places.

“Persons who bought this to go shopping with also bought a lot of extension cords.” Amazon

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lol

CDC now agrees, regarding surfaces:

Doesn’t that also imply the run on hand sanitizer was also pointless regarding COVID?

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Unclear. The run on hand-sanitizer might be one reason why surfaces don’t matter that much. Because it’s pretty easy to clean your hands between touching potentially infected surfaces and touching your face.

IMO yes. All the time/money wasted on hyper-cleaning should have been put to use on upgrading ventilation.

We had a couple basketball tournaments over the winter it was written in the rules that the ball was supposed to be wiped down with clorox wipes every 5 minutes of play. Ridiculous.

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I feel vindicated. I cleaned slightly more in the last year but not much, and I quit spraying down shopping carts ages ago. I did have a weird for me cleaning spree after I had Covid. Even if I hadn’t wanted to I had to bc a huge ant colony moved into my kitchen while I was in the hospital. (Don’t blame my peeps: one was still recovering from Covid and the other from surgery.)

My takeaway is that just washing your hands is enough. Not that absolutely no cleaning is helpful.

Well yeah, that sounds absurd. When I think about the run on hand sanitizer, I think of wiping down my hands when I leave a store, not wiping down every surface I might possibly touch.

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I bought zero hand sanitizer during COVID. I had bought a 6 pack of 8oz bottles sometime during late 2019 and found a couple of big Sams club sized bottles stashed away this time last year from when my kids were born and it was important to keep them away from germs. I never left the house often enough to get through any of it, and when I am at home I just wash them in the bathroom.

Maybe the first month of COVID I cleaned a few things more than others, but apathy set in pretty quickly and I have been pretty lazy for the past year on just about everything around the house. Suddenly I am coming up with all sorts of house projects I could work on.

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A lot of distilleries turned perfectly fine distillate into hand sanitizer. What could have been used to keep people drunk during the lockdown ended up being used to make people feel cleaner.

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I bought some of that. :slight_smile:

I had given all my hand sanitizer to a friend, who held a large event shortly before everything locked down, and after it got hard to buy it. So I had literally no hand sanitizer knocking around the house.

If I’d had as much as The_President, I wouldn’t have had to buy any, though. And we’ve been pretty careful about cleaning our hands when we go out.

Bump, for this list of “places most likely to contact COVID.”

#35 is going out for a walk.
#1 is “hanging out with a sick Person”!
So, out of 35, I’ve done (or will do, attending an outdoor wedding this summer) six of the top 10, six of the next 15, and seven of the final 10.
So, over half. Still alive.