Thanks for writing about this. As chronically ill person, I cannot afford to get covid and the risk of catching it at home is something I've had to be super aware of constantly. Even as everyone else in my life has gone back to some level of "normal", I'm still at home and my risk level is entirely about who else is in my home and what have they been doing outside of it. So I've been spending $$$$ on air purifiers which I am lucky to be able to afford, and I feel like a huge killjoy reminding the people I live with to be cautious out there. Imagine how many lives could have been saved if the government had started giving out air purifiers the moment the scientists realized that covid was airborne?
At the most capitalist level, it was a real missed opportunity to put a shot into the arm of the air purifier industry. The Spanish Flu got us all radiators. What did COVID give us?
There was just a paper put out that found if you design HVAC to let all air in at the floor, and all uptake at the ceiling, so that airflow is upwards everywhere in the room, pathogens dropped 85%.
Just found you and looking about before subscribing properly. I've seen your work in bits over the years - finding all those Canadian headlines approving of the Iraq War was some needed journalism that nobody else did. Americans got the "Shock and Awe" movie with several A-listers; we got your headline compilation. That should be up on a Hall of Shame somewhere.
Just checking in with a thumbs-up for your "at home" point. I ran a pandemic blog for 2 years to alleviate my anxieties, and I spotted a single thing that no journalist did, and I can't get any to look into.
90% of the dying was by old people, retired, not at school, not out much (even before the pandemic). They caught it at home, surely. They caught it from family and younger friends.
Those who caught it getting around in the World, those under 55 did barely 10% of the dying (though far more of the cases).
For the overall pandemic, the USA had 3X the dead/million that Canada had (taking two years 2022-Mar, as an arbitary end-point - the 3X has dropped since.)
For the "Under 50" pandemic (The age reports come in round decades) the USA had SEVEN to EIGHT times the death-rate of Canada, and the numbers were higher before vaccines came, so it was not our vaccination rate.
At that Mar-2022 point, I think Canada had lost about 1100 souls under 50. An American equivalent would be just under 10,000 dead, but they'd lost nearly 70,000 - more dead who were too young to remember Vietnam, than died in Vietnam.
So I kind of scratched my head when nobody else took note of that, and Britain also had 3X our death rates, great nations like Germany and France had higher death rates, BC had just finished rebuilding the Coquihalla in good time, and TheLine was telling me "Everything is Broken" because they couldn't get their airline luggage.
Thanks for writing about this. As chronically ill person, I cannot afford to get covid and the risk of catching it at home is something I've had to be super aware of constantly. Even as everyone else in my life has gone back to some level of "normal", I'm still at home and my risk level is entirely about who else is in my home and what have they been doing outside of it. So I've been spending $$$$ on air purifiers which I am lucky to be able to afford, and I feel like a huge killjoy reminding the people I live with to be cautious out there. Imagine how many lives could have been saved if the government had started giving out air purifiers the moment the scientists realized that covid was airborne?
At the most capitalist level, it was a real missed opportunity to put a shot into the arm of the air purifier industry. The Spanish Flu got us all radiators. What did COVID give us?
There was just a paper put out that found if you design HVAC to let all air in at the floor, and all uptake at the ceiling, so that airflow is upwards everywhere in the room, pathogens dropped 85%.
https://www.castanet.net/news/Kelowna/475931/UBCO-study-finds-85-per-cent-reduction-in-pathogens-when-accounting-for-airflow-dynamics
...you can only hope that will affect future classroom designs...
Just found you and looking about before subscribing properly. I've seen your work in bits over the years - finding all those Canadian headlines approving of the Iraq War was some needed journalism that nobody else did. Americans got the "Shock and Awe" movie with several A-listers; we got your headline compilation. That should be up on a Hall of Shame somewhere.
Just checking in with a thumbs-up for your "at home" point. I ran a pandemic blog for 2 years to alleviate my anxieties, and I spotted a single thing that no journalist did, and I can't get any to look into.
90% of the dying was by old people, retired, not at school, not out much (even before the pandemic). They caught it at home, surely. They caught it from family and younger friends.
Those who caught it getting around in the World, those under 55 did barely 10% of the dying (though far more of the cases).
For the overall pandemic, the USA had 3X the dead/million that Canada had (taking two years 2022-Mar, as an arbitary end-point - the 3X has dropped since.)
For the "Under 50" pandemic (The age reports come in round decades) the USA had SEVEN to EIGHT times the death-rate of Canada, and the numbers were higher before vaccines came, so it was not our vaccination rate.
At that Mar-2022 point, I think Canada had lost about 1100 souls under 50. An American equivalent would be just under 10,000 dead, but they'd lost nearly 70,000 - more dead who were too young to remember Vietnam, than died in Vietnam.
http://brander.ca/cccc#dyingyoungsumup
So I kind of scratched my head when nobody else took note of that, and Britain also had 3X our death rates, great nations like Germany and France had higher death rates, BC had just finished rebuilding the Coquihalla in good time, and TheLine was telling me "Everything is Broken" because they couldn't get their airline luggage.