Today, Explained - Let’s talk about ventilation

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Ventilation is key to reopening office buildings safely. But The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson says many workers aren’t going back, even when it’s safer. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Back in early April, before much of the country had started wearing masks, we made an episode about why we should. I spoke to Harvard professor Joe Allen, who specializes in indoor air quality.

Yeah, that's interesting. I forgot. That was the early days of mask wearing, right? And I came out with a piece that said, you know, the debate is over. Everyone should wear a mask. At the time, that seemed controversial. And now I think hopefully everyone realizes that's not so controversial. It might be our best way out of this mess. But the same thing, I think we're at the similar place now with our buildings as we were with masks back in April.

Joe's not talking about putting masks on our buildings. He's talking about ventilation. The number one risk factor is time spent indoors. In fact, almost every outbreak of three or more people is associated with time spent indoors. I think the world is just starting to wake up to the fact that airborne transmission is happening. And now that they're waking up,

it's a realization that, whoa, the building actually matters. People are starting to say, we better pay attention to things like ventilation and filtration. Okay, ventilation and filtration. Before we dive in, how does aerosol transmission actually work inside a building? Like, if I'm at a restaurant and someone sneezes, do I need to be running for the door? Airborne transmission just means that you can get this beyond this magical six-foot buffer. But distance still matters, and engineering controls also matter. So let's make it really tangible.

Let's say you and I are sitting across from each other at a table, and I'm sick and infectious, and I'm emitting aerosols as I talk, right? Well, the closer you are, the bigger the dose you will have. Now, some of these viral particles can spread beyond that six foot and go to the other side of the room, but the dose will be lower. And if the ventilation system is really cranking and bringing out a lot of fresh outdoor air, it'll be even lower because you're diluting what's in the space. One way to think about this is like cigarette smoke. So if I'm smoking a cigarette and you're three feet from me, well, that's going to be really noxious and in your face. One way to think about this is like cigarette smoke. So if I'm smoking a cigarette

and you're three feet from me, well, that's going to be really noxious and in your face. At six feet, a little bit less. Across the room, you'll still be able to smell it. But imagine that room has a HEPA filter going and a lot of fresh outdoor air. You may not even smell it across the room, right? And smoke particles, that's just a particle. You could think about the same thing like a viral particle. It's actually a good way to think about it. Imagine everybody's smoking. That's not the best visual. But you're walking down the street, somebody's coming up, you don't want to smell their smoke. That's their breath. Okay, I'll take an extra step to the side. Or if someone's at four feet, you know what, I'm going to back it up to six feet, maybe even 10 feet would be even a little bit better. All right. Well, that's some useful background. Tell me how to know whether a building I'm walking into is well ventilated or well filtered. Yeah, well, that's the hard part, right? You really can't. It's one of these things you have to ask about, but it's critically

important. And the way to think about those two, you know, ventilation and filtration, is that every time we talk or sing or cough, you emit a bunch of aerosols of different sizes. And they're going to be removed through two mechanisms, dilution through ventilation or air cleaning through filtration. And so that's why those two components are so critical in a building level strategy. How well ventilated is the typical office building? All right, let's start with the problem we're in right now is that we're in the sick building era, largely because our current ventilation standards are not designed for health.

So back in the 70s, in the energy crisis, we tightened up our building envelope, choked off the air supply. We let engineers set ventilation based on energy, not human health. And as a result, we have a buildup of indoor pollutants, off-gassing from carpets and furniture. And now we also have the introduction of infectious aerosol from people. And we're not diluting that air quick enough in nearly every

single building we spend time in because they're all designed to these same minimum standards and not really designed for human health. Does cranking up the air conditioner help? I know a lot of buildings do that anyway in the summertime. Yeah, but you know, it's not necessarily a problem with air conditioning systems, right? If you have a central air conditioning system in a big building, commercial office building, it is bringing in outdoor air. The problem is that the standards only require a low level of outdoor air. They need to be bringing in a lot more outdoor air. The problem is that the standards only require a low level of outdoor air. They need to be bringing in a lot more outdoor air. One, we've talked about this for a long time. We've

known the benefits to more outdoor air, to better cognitive function, reduced infectious disease transmission, reduced sick building symptoms, and yet we still design our buildings to these very minimum ventilation standards. And we're paying the price for that right now with COVID. Okay, so how hard is it to fix a building's ventilation system? It's actually not that complicated of a fix. The reality is most of these systems can just be tweaked in subtle ways to bring in more outdoor air. So if you have a ventilation system, you have an outdoor air damper that's modulating how much outdoor air comes in. And so most buildings are set for 20% outdoor air, 80% recirculated air. Well, those dampers

can be switched to bring in more outdoor air. There's a bit of an energy penalty, but that penalty is worth paying right now in the middle of a pandemic to bring in a bit more outdoor air. And then once it's in there, you got to up your game on filtration? Well, if you're just recirculating the air through no filtration or a low-grade filter, you're not cleaning the air. But if you upgrade to a higher efficiency filter, call a MERV 13, M-E-R-V 13 filter,

you're starting to capture a large percentage of airborne particles, including viral particles. So two things are happening. One, you bring in more outdoor air, and then any air that's recirculated in the building has to go through a higher grade filter. And that way you're addressing both cleaning and dilution. Okay. And how many buildings are installing better filtration at this point? You know, a lot of them are actually, at least the ones I'm talking to are the people that are following the guidance here.

I know there's a run on MERV 13 filters. That's a good sign, right? People are out there upgrading their filters. The problem is I do talk to organizations still that if I talk to them, they'll say, well, that's the first time we've heard about buildings and ventilation and filtration. Why? Now, people in my field have been yelling

from the rooftops since February that you need to put in these control strategies. But CDC and WHO have been really reluctant to acknowledge airborne spread. And as a result, they have been slow to give guidance to people that they need to control this. And even just recently, the end of last week of August, the National Academies had a meeting to talk about airborne spread. So think about that.

In February, we knew it was happening. We're trying to give guidance. And it's only in late August that we're starting to even have these really deep scientific conferences dedicated to the topic. In the interim period, many buildings aren't putting in the appropriate controls. Well, let's talk about what they're doing instead. The first few times I went into office buildings for like a dentist or something like that, it was all sanitize this and sanitize that, wipe down the chairs, the tables. I've seen these videos of people spraying down entire movie theaters with

sanitizer as if they're, you know, watering the plants. I've seen the Denver Broncos walking through these misting stations on their way to practice. I mean, when we spoke back in April, I was still wiping down all my groceries. Is all the sanitizing a joke? Well, you know, I'd like to poke fun at you that you were that guy who was wiping down, you know, every ketchup bottle and mustard bottle and every piece of grocery. Yeah, man, it wasn't fun. It was a lot of extra work. Yeah, that's right. But look, I mean, you can, you don't have to blame yourself. That was early days of the pandemic and no one really knew what was going on.

So yeah, it was okay to be extra cautious. I'm trying to give you an out here. Thank you. But the reality is, is that, yeah, I think we're overcleaning. And some people have written about it as hygiene theater, that we're doing these things that make us feel good, but they're not actually tied

to really solid risk reduction principles. For example, you mentioned, you know, the NFL players walk through this tunnel and spray themselves. Well, that doesn't really do risk reduction principles. For example, you mentioned, you know, the NFL players walk through this tunnel and spray themselves. Well, that doesn't really do anything for risk. For COVID, it probably increases their risk of a respiratory hazard, to be honest. Because the simple way to break the chain

of transmission through any contaminated surface is just wash your hands occasionally or use hand sanitizer if you're not near soap and water. What has been the cost of our hygiene theater in this country? A couple things. One is it takes away time and attention from fixing actual problems. The other cost is real dollars.

I mean, I've talked to some commercial landlord holders who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on enhanced cleaning, even in buildings that are at super low occupancy because no one wants to go back to work. And we can feel good when we see everybody cleaning all the time, but it's not really reducing risk in any real way. Okay, so buildings need to bring in more outdoor air and upgrade to MERV 13 filters to keep people safe, but even once they do, a lot of people are never going back to their offices. Support for Today Explained Thank you. by Wirecutter. AuraFrames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her

with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramosferm, and I am still working from home. The entire Today Explained team is still working from home. All of Vox is still working from home. And it sounds like we will be for quite some time, maybe summer 2021, with or without safe office buildings. It's going to take a long time for a lot of those of us who are fortunate enough to work from home to get back to before-time work life in the United States. Probably it's going to take until there's a well-distributed vaccine. And even then, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic says

a lot of people are never coming back. There is definitely a sense that tens of millions of people went to work from home. Tens of millions of people were suddenly forced into this work-from-home experiment where they didn't understand what remote work meant. And then all of a sudden, their companies were forced to suddenly be these far-flung enterprises. The estimates for what happens in the post-vaccine world go as

follows. There was a Harvard Business School survey that estimated that when all this is over, one in six workers is projected to continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week. One in six workers is a minority of workers, but it still means that something like 20 to 30 million people could be permanently remote work for the future. That's a huge number of people. And even if just that number of people do decide to change the way they work, it could really change a lot about America. That could reshape the U.S. workforce. It could change cities. It could change U.S. demography. And it could the U.S. workforce. It could change cities. It could change U.S. demography. And it could change U.S. politics. I think it's really important to point

out that even tiny changes in our remote work future could have huge implications for economics and technology and politics. Well, let's talk about some of those implications. What are the most essential changes that are happening to people? What are the most essential changes that are happening to people? What are the most essential changes that people are experiencing now that so many people are working remotely? I think the most obvious is just that you're alone. People used to occupy two spaces in their lives, at least, which is their home and their office or whatever their place of work was. And now they're just stuck in their living rooms all day long. So sometimes that can be frustrating. Sometimes it can be absolutely depleting, especially if you have to work while

taking care of kids or taking care of other people in your family. And then for others, it's just unbelievably boring to not be able to leave where you work. I think the other implication of not being able to be around other people is it means that you don't meet anyone new and you don't have face-to-face interactions with your colleagues. And there's all sorts of, I think, weird things that flow from that. You know, I know that in every single office, there's always a couple of people who are lovable, but a little bit annoying. And you remember that they're lovable because they bring in guacamole on Thursdays and they give you a high five when your football team wins on Sundays when they see you on a Monday morning.

But when your life is entirely mediated by Slack and Gchat and Twitter, then all of a sudden those lovable, annoying people just become purely annoying abstractions. And I think it changes the way that we interact with our colleagues, the way that we think about our colleagues. And then finally, I think that when you're stuck at home, you are starved of new experiences. When people are starved of new experiences, they don't have variety, that spice of life,

they just get ornery. And so I think for a variety of ways, this forced working from home experience really does change so many things about our lives. And somehow those changes seem to sort of pale in comparison to the long-term changes and effects that this might have on our cities and our office parks and our commercial real estate.

What's going to happen there? Yeah, I'm really interested to see what happens with commercial real estate. Here's one scenario. Let's say that you have a lot of companies decide that they actually only need about 60% of the office space that they originally signed leases for in 2015 or 2016. Well, that frees up a lot of office space. It probably reduces office rents tremendously. So do you have new companies moving into those office spaces? Do you have

any pressure for those commercial real estate spaces to become residential real estate spaces? That could have some interesting effects. It could mean a lot more work for construction workers, a lot more work for interior decorators. It could also mean a lot more housing supply in downtown urban areas, which is a great need for lots of cities, especially cities on the coast like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston. That could have huge effects on rent, huge effects on housing supply, and other kind of jobs that are in demand in those areas. And what about all of the businesses in those districts, in those downtowns, that supported all the office workers who were previously there all the time? All the,

you know, walk-in shoppers who are now exclusively on Amazon or maybe at their local grocery stores. Do we have any idea so far what the impact has been on these businesses, on hotels, on the airline industries that used to house a lot of traveling business people? Yeah, we know this has been utterly catastrophic for the leisure hospitality industry. It has been worse than a Great Depression. It has been an absolute evisceration of these companies, of hotels, of restaurants. The question isn't whether this is a disaster. It obviously is a disaster. The question is what happens in a post-vaccine, post-herd immunity, post-antiviral medication world, how many of these companies will bounce

back. I'm hopeful that Americans still want to go out to restaurants in 2022. I know I will certainly want to go out to restaurants in 2022. But again, where will I be? Will I be at my office or will I be at my apartment? Those are two different places for the vast majority of people. So if they're not going into their downtown office, that totally changes the local economics of business districts. It means that if you're a restaurant or if you're a retailer that relies on weekday foot traffic from people just walking around on an average Thursday, well, if 20 or 25% of your people are showing up in that business district on an average Thursday in 2022, suddenly you can't pay rent. So again, there's all sorts of

implications of this future that I'm describing, but definitely one of them is that rents, both commercial and residential, will fall in expensive urban areas. And that's really bad potentially for landowners. It could have some other trickle-down effects, but it also means that in a few years, you could have people move into these areas and pay lower rents to live, lower rents to open an office. It could be, as I've described it, as kind of like a forest fire effect. With a forest fire, you have an absolute decimation of the forest, but then what grows back tends to be a slightly more diverse flora. Are the cities, when they do come back, going to look different? I don't know what your experience is, but it seems like people are leaving cities right now too. Yeah, and it's important to say

that people were already leaving expensive coastal cities in 2019 and early 2020 before there was a pandemic. So this is, as we so often say with the plague, an acceleration of pre-existing trends. But I do think that you're going to see people leave New York City. I think you're going to see people leave San Francisco. I think it's obviously happening. You look at housing values in those cities. You look at the rental market in those cities.

Prices are going down across the board. That's a sign that people in really expensive areas are either moving out to the suburbs, where their money buys a bit more space, or they're moving to other parts of the country where there's just more space, period. I personally think that this is going to accelerate a resorting of Americans, especially liberal millennials, from the coasts to the Sun Belt, moving from the Carolinas down through Georgia, including Texas and the Southwest. And there's a really interesting implication of liberal millennials resorting to the Sun Belt.

Right now, Democrats are disadvantaged in the Electoral College, such that Hillary Clinton won Manhattan and Brooklyn by one million votes. That's more than Trump's margins the superstar cities on the coast, it means that potentially, rather than Trump in 2020 having a three-point electoral college advantage, a Democrat running in 2024 or 2028 could actually have an electoral college advantage. So again, lots of tiny individual decisions made by people living in dense cities could have huge implications for economics and politics. You talk about this sort of accelerating a trend that we were already seeing.

I wonder, just across the board, in a company like Vox, for example, we already had people working remotely and all over the country in their bedrooms and in their home offices. Were we going to go this way anyway? And the pandemic just sort of gave us a huge nudge in that direction? You know, it's actually really funny. So in February this year, I walked into my editor's office, the editor of the Atlantic magazine, Don Peck. And I said, Don, I have an idea for a column for the magazine. So ever since the invention of the personal computer, people have been predicting the death of distance. It can work for a software company in San Francisco and live in Boise, but for year after year after year,

it just wasn't happening. But then I said to Don, there's actually a study that just came out from the Federal Reserve that found that remote work is actually starting to take off. And I said to him, I think you're really going to see 2020 being the year that Americans recognize

that remote work really is the future. And then I got scooped by fucking COVID because this subtle observation that I was making turned out to be the most fucking obvious thing you could possibly say about the economy. So COVID essentially compressed maybe 10, 20, 25 years of change into six weeks, two months. So as with so many things, this plague is an accelerator, not an inventor. It is pulling forward the future, not setting us along some other time path. Derek Thompson. You can read his work about the changing American city and workforce at theatlantic.com.

Joe Allen from the first half of the show writes, too. He's got a book called Healthy Buildings, How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity. Today's episode was produced remotely by Bridget McCarthy, and she's been producing episodes on our show since we launched back in early 2018. In fact, she's produced more episodes of our show than anyone else, and today is her last. She's off to unravel the mysteries of the human psyche over at another show called Hidden Brain. Thank you for the shows, the laughs, and explaining Ukraine, Bridget. We'll miss you. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Amina Alsadi, Halima Shah, Muj Zaydi,

Jillian Weinberger, Afim Shapiro, and Noam Hassenfeld, who makes music, too. The show also features the jams of the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. We're blessed with Will Reed's help this week, Cecilia Lay checks facts, and is also producing this week. Liz Kelly Nelson is the editorial director of Vox Podcasts, and Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.