Clean indoor air to reduce COVID and other health problems, White House Response Team says.
The Department of Energy is also offering one-on-one consultations to schools to drive air quality.Joseph Allen, DSc, MPH, director of the Healthy Buildings program and an associate professor at Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, said that the indoor environment has an outsized effect on public health.Allen, 47, said that for him that number is 42 years spent inside spaces.
When most people realize they spend 90% of their time indoors, a startling possibility comes into play:"The person who manages your building has a greater impact on your health than your doctor," he said."Think about that."every building should pursue to reduce COVID and other respiratory illnesses. Give every building a tune-up."We do this for our cars, we don't do it for our buildings," Allen saidUpgrade filtration."We need to move away from filters designed to protect equipment to filters designed to protect people. MERV 13 is the new minimum"It's not a complete list, he said;"It's where you should start.
"When you're deciding what school you're going to visit or even enroll in, you'll have a snapshot of what we're able to gather. Hopefully we'll have something up before the end of the school year," he said. Shelly L. Miller, PhD, a professor of mechanical engineering in the Environmental Engineering Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that germicidal ultraviolet disinfection, used currently in water quality, holds promise for cleaning the COVID virus and other pathogens from indoor air.