November 26, 2023

Air quality is not a substitute for respirators

There's no excuse. Wear a respirator!

Our current and ongoing Covid pandemic has changed the way I think about air. Because Covid is indeed airborne. Covid is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and scientists already learned from the similar SARS-CoV-1 virus in 2002 to 2004 that it is indeed airborne. It’s not transmitted through touch (fomite) or droplets that stay within six feet of an infectious person. It’s airborne and it can fill an entire room or outdoor wide area, just like smoke.

Here’s a scientific citation about how SARS-CoV-1 was airborne. This is one of a plethora of scientific documents online which all confirm the same thing:

“Role of air distribution in SARS transmission during the largest nosocomial outbreak in Hong Kong

Y. Li, X. Huang, I. T. S. Yu, T. W. Wong, H. Qian

First published: 14 December 2004

...

This paper presents a detailed air distribution study of a hospital ward during a major nosocomial outbreak in Hong Kong in March 2003. Retrospective on-site inspections and measurements of the ventilation design and air distribution system showed that the flow rates in the supply diffusers and exhaust grilles were not balanced. It was suggested that flow balancing be periodically carried out in hospital wards – say once a year. CFD simulations showed that there was an association between the concentration decay from the index patient's bed and the spatial SARS infection pattern. This provided environmental evidence of an airborne transmission route for SARS in Ward 8A.

The highly possible airborne transmission of the SARS virus in Ward 8A revealed the need for the development of improved ventilation and air-conditioning systems in a SARS isolation ward. Such a system design should effectively reduce the risk of cross-infection between patients and between a patient and health care workers.”

When SARS-CoV-2 (Covid), a very similar virus, started ripping through the world in late 2019, top scientists also knew that Covid is airborne. Us concerned laypeople weren’t informed of it because the fact that Covid is airborne was deliberately covered up. Here is my evidence...

The February 11th 2020 press conference conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) was led by WHO General Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO Executive Director Mike Ryan. During the conference, Tedros initially said “This is airborne. Corona is airborne. It’s more contagious.” Later on, Ryan whispered something in Tedros’ ear. They both had a laugh. Soon after, Tedros said “I used the military word, airborne. I meant, to spread by droplets or respiratory transmission. Please take it that way. Not the military language. Ha ha.” Yes, he actually did laugh. Lying about how a deadly and disabling virus is transmitted, and subsequently killing and disabling at least hundreds of millions of people who probably wouldn’t have been infected had the WHO not lied... That’s just so funny! Ha ha!

I hate Twitter/X with a passion and I deactivated my account on November 1st. But the best evidence of the WHO’s lying, the quotes I cited just now, can be found in the two roughly 15 second videos embedded in this tweet:

Otherwise, you can patiently watch the entire 58 minute February 11th 2020 conference on YouTube here:

The WHO lied to us because acknowledging that Covid is airborne makes it a societal and institutional problem rather than just a personal hygiene problem. Buildings don’t need to get better air ventilation and air filtering if Covid just spreads in droplets within six feet or two metres of a person. So all the bullshit we were compelled to do in 2020 was all theatre to justify the droplet lie. It’s markings on the floor in the shopping mall or grocery store warning everyone to stand six feet apart. It’s lots of handwashing stations and hand sanitizer. It’s plexiglass barriers in front of service workers with lots of gaps above and below that infected air can still easily blow around. Handwashing is good hygiene and we should all do it, but it does absolutely nothing to stop Covid. Nor does any of that other bullshit.

If Covid was spread through droplets or fomite or direct physical contact, then preventing transmission is all just about personal responsibility. That’s very convenient for our capitalist overlords. But Covid is airborne. And part of the strategy for beating it should entail improving ventilation and HEPA, MERV, or CR box air filtering in all indoor spaces, from homes to hospitals, from schools to convenience stores.

Countless research has been published about Covid being airborne ever since. A personal favourite is a WIRED article written by Megan Molteni that was published on May 13th, 2021. I have made the article in PDF format publicly available on my Google Drive if you’d like to check it out yourself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K9QvQQxMN-wEnBIEDO-oSvsFsQh3CQ6t/view?usp=sharing

It’s about Virginia Tech aerosol scientist Linsey Marr and how hard she had to fight against scientific pedagogy and hegemony to get the COVID IS AIRBORNE message out. Quotes from the WIRED article:

“Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before (April 2020), the organization had tweeted ‘FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.’ That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. ‘You just don’t argue with Lidia about physics,’ she says.”

By the way, I keep a Google Drive folder full of scientific evidence about Covid. I’m always adding to it. Feel free to share it as much as you want. I keep it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1h1GWOB9Uz_tpikuP45IqiCriYc3azUF7?usp=drive_link

By early 2022, I realized that the true nature of Covid was being covered up by WHO, the CDC, Health Canada, the mass media, and many other capitalist overlord controlled entities. In addition to learning that cloth masks and surgical masks are terrible as a Covid protection measure (an extension of the droplet lie) and N95 respirators should be worn instead because they make an airtight seal around your face (if fitted and worn properly)... I also learned the importance of air hygiene.

I checked my home and fortunately because I live in an apartment in a nice condo building that was built in 2019, the HVAC and overall ventilation of my apartment is excellent. And my apartment doesn’t share airflow with any of my neighbors, nor the hallways. I have my own personal outdoor air intake. I covered up the vent in my bathroom to be safe, just in case my bathroom vent is shared. Air flows into my bathroom from the rest of my apartment instead-- I shower and bathe with the door open, a luxury I have from living alone. The CO2 in my apartment fluctuates between 450 and 500 ppm. And I put a good quality HEPA air filtering device in each room in my apartment. My best quality Levoit HEPA device runs right near my front door in order to suck in any Covid that might flow into my home from the shared corridor. My home-- where I live, work, and spend literally 99.9% of my time, has the best indoor air quality possible.

I sure am lucky that I didn’t get Covid before my realization in early 2022. I credit that to mainly staying alone at home anyway, the luck of my work-from-home cybersecurity writing career. And since 2022, I’ve completely avoided Covid through staying at home and wearing a respirator every single second I have to be away from home. I even put my respirator on to take my garbage down the garbage chute that’s right outside of my apartment, in the hallway of my floor.

It sure would be nice if other people had the privilege of good indoor air quality in their schools, homes, hospitals, retail stores, or anywhere else they go. A massive effort must be undertaken and government funded to improve ventilation and air filtering in all indoor spaces, especially public places. The government (all governments worldwide) should especially pay to improve air quality in hospitals, medical clinics, schools, daycares, and the homes of people who cannot afford to pay for their own air quality improvements. Actually, scrap the “homes of people who cannot afford to pay for their own air quality improvements” part, because means testing is inefficient and a way to punish poor people. The government should pay to improve the air quality in everyone’s homes. They have the money, especially governments in the US, UK, and Canada. All they got to do is stop spending trillions of dollars on killing people in foreign countries!

That being said... Improving air quality alone isn’t enough to protect people from Covid. It lessens Covid transmission risk. It must be done. But even with the best ventilation and air quality imaginable, there is still too much Covid danger in the air.

The truth is so fucking simple. And it’s infuriating that even supposedly Covid cautious people think that air quality is a singular solution.

For exhibits of supposedly Covid cautious people thinking air quality alone is enough, here’s some Bluesky posts made by physicist Katie Mack this weekend:

For even worse offenders, look up charlatans like T. Ryan Gregory and Joey Fox. You can look them up yourself, because even touching what those assholes have posted makes me feel icky as hell.

Here’s how simple the truth is. Covid travels like smoke.

Covid lingers in the air for hours if there’s poor ventilation and little to no air filtering. So the utility of air quality measures as it pertains to Covid is that ventilation and air filtering stops Covid from staying in the room.

But air quality measures cannot stop near field transmission. In a well ventilated room or outdoors, the smoke from my cigarette will go away. But if I light a cigarette near you, even outdoors (which has the best possible ventilation), you will breathe in my second hand smoke.

So no Katie Mack, not even the best ventilated and air filtered restaurant is safe to dine in. And you’re misleading people. Air quality does reduce the risk a bit. Airbags and seatbelts in cars make me a bit safer as a passenger in a vehicle, but it’s no reason to think I would be safe riding with a drunk driver. That’s the perfect analogy. What you said is like saying “I can’t wait for cars to have airbags, then we can enjoy a few beers behind the steering wheel.”

These sorts of myths have a literal death toll. So yes Katie, as a scientific role model of whom people look up to, you deserve being called out by me. (By the way, you should never worship any “expert.”)

It’s so fucking maddening. Time and again, I hear people say stuff like “I wear a mask in crowded spaces.” Great, but you should wear a respirator in vacant spaces too. And outdoors near people. A room without other people currently present is still dangerous because Covid lingers in the air for hours, especially without ventilation or filtering. From the EPA, which has been a bit more honest than the CDC:

“Transmission of COVID-19 from inhalation of virus in the air can occur at distances greater than six feet. Particles from an infected person can move throughout an entire room or indoor space. The particles can also linger in the air after a person has left the room – they can remain airborne for hours in some cases.”

And yes, outdoors is safer, but not completely safe. In addition to many, many anecdotes of people getting infected by Covid outdoors, there is lots of scientific documentation about deer getting infected with Covid and transmitting Covid. Deer are pretty much always outdoors.

See this:

University of Toronto: Researchers identify SARS-CoV-2 variant in white-tailed deer, evidence of deer-to-human transmission

CBS News: Deer spread COVID to humans multiple times, new research suggests

There’s also this article about outdoor Covid transmission in general from Fortune in 2022:

Your COVID protection outside isn’t what it was in 2020. Here’s why it’s time to think more critically about outdoor gatherings

Very sadly, although you should get vaccinated if you can get vaccinated safely in an environment where everyone is wearing a respirator, Covid vaccines have never caught up with the evolution of the virus. You’re always getting vaccinated based on an outdated version of the virus. So the vaccine may prevent imminent death, but it absolutely doesn’t prevent infection, nor transmission.

Somewhere around 40% of all people who are infectious with Covid are asymptomatic. So there are no signs of whether or not a person is infectious other than with reliable accuracy Covid testing.

No restaurant, no concert, no air travel, no movie is worth getting a virus that fuses brain cells, decimates T-cells like HIV, and eats the mitochondria in bodily cells. I manage to stay the fuck at home 99.9% of the time and treat myself to restaurant food through delivery only. If you think you need to do any of that shit “for your mental health,” you are disrespecting the sanctity of actual mental health and you’re a whiny baby plague rat, and I literally hate you.

Air quality measures or being outdoors stops Covid from lingering in the air for hours. But it does not remove Covid from the air the moment an infectious person breathes. The only defence for near field Covid transmission is for everyone to wear a good quality respirator. It protects infectious people from transmitting it, and it prevents me from breathing in Covid and getting infected.

Every single person going around maskless in public should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves.

Here’s something to read about what a proper respirator is, and why surgical masks (baggy blues) and cloth masks are almost as useless as nothing...

University of Minnesota, CIDRAP: Wear a respirator, not a cloth or surgical mask, to protect against respiratory viruses

“Surgical masks vary widely in filter material, design, and effectiveness, but most don't have high filter efficiency. The filter tests required by the US Food and Drug Administration are not predictive of surgical mask filter performance, so it's impossible to know which surgical mask filters can collect small particles. Surgical masks are not expected to fit tightly against the face, so they have considerable inward and outward leakage of particles.”

“Respirators are not masks. The correct term for a device approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to prevent inhalation of hazardous materials is "respirator" (and not ‘respirator mask’).

Respirators have very effective filters and are designed to fit most faces. A respirator filter is easy to breathe through, because it's made of a fibrous electret material that has low breathing resistance. Any type of respirator filter approved by NIOSH—N, P, R, 95, 99, 100—will be effective at collecting human-generated aerosols.”

This is what I look like whenever I’m not inside of my home. That’s a PrescientX Breathe respirator on my face:

That respirator goes on my face before I open my front door to leave home. Because the hallway is public and people are probably breathing Covid into the hallway air, which lingers even after they’re gone.

And when I get back home, I leave my respirator on for about five minutes after I close my door so I’m protected as I wait for the HEPA device near my front door to suck the Covid out.

This is how I have completely avoided Covid. By properly understanding airborne transmission. From making my boyfriend of five years take a Cue test before I let him into my home. I take zero risks. No risk is worth it given how Covid is very much like airborne HIV, as you can read about in Anthony Leonardi’s work.

If airborne transmission confuses you, it shouldn’t be confusing at all.

Think... “If someone smoked a cigarette here, would I be exposed to their secondhand smoke? If people smoked cigarettes in the hallway thirty minutes ago (even if they’re now gone), would I still smell the smoke? Probably yes.” No risk is worth it.

Air quality is good, but it’s not a singular solution. WEAR A GODDAMN FUCKING RESPIRATOR!

Kim Crawley, buttondown.email/Crowgirl, @crowgirl.bsky.social, @crowgirl@hachyderm.io, linktr.ee/kimcrawley