As employees and students prepare for their return to offices and classrooms, an NBC Bay Area investigation reveals a surprising lack of oversight regarding indoor air quality, which may have led to more COVID-19 infections and deaths. Experts argue the problem existed well before the pandemic and continues to threaten workplaces and schools across the country.
A lack of education, awareness, and accountability may be leading to hazardous indoor air conditions inside a wide array of buildings throughout the nation. One study found 85% of classrooms had inadequate air ventilation, allowing toxins to accumulate.
“People cannot tell that a space is under ventilated,” said Theresa Pistochini, Co-Director of Engineering at UC Davis and an expert on air ventilation and filtration systems. “It’s extremely difficult. We can be walking around in these spaces with…just no awareness.”
Pistochini, who helps run the Western Cooling Efficiency Center and the Energy Efficiency Institute at UC Davis, says indoor spaces are often loaded with a cocktail of chemicals that either “gas off” from building materials or are brought in from the outdoors.
“We’re all breathing these respiratory aerosols,” she said. “So the purpose of ventilation is to dilute all of that.”
Many products used in offices, such as cleansers and pesticides, can emit dangerous pollutants, so its critical the building’s heating and cooling system ventilate and filter air effectively, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
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To explain the power of air filtration and ventilation, Pitstochini suggests imagining what it would take to clean a swimming pool after someone tossed mounds of glitter into the water.
“You can dump some of that pool water with the glitter and bring in fresh water — that’s what ventilation is,” she explained. “Or, you can run your water through a filter and pull out the little particles,” she said, adding that if that filtering and dilution does not happen, “aerosols will just build up and build up and build up and you have no way to get them out.”
Pistochini and her colleagues at UC Davis have also posted animated videos to thoughtfully explain the significance of both air filtration and ventilation.
Experts Warn ‘Inadequate Ventilation’ is Common Problem
Pistochini said there remains a surprising lack of oversight when it comes to air quality in buildings. For example, she says, offices do not have to prove they regularly inspect their ventilation and filtration systems.
When Pistochini examined 94 school classrooms in California, she found 85% did not have adequate ventilation, even though their heating and cooling systems were recently installed.
“Increased oversight of HVAC replacements, or other ways to address widespread inadequate ventilation in California classrooms, are needed, likely through state intervention,” said Pistochini, following the release of her 2019 study.
Other studies have shown increasing ventilation rates can lead to “statistically significant improvements” in both health and student performance, according to research collected by UC Davis.
Pistochini now suggests installing carbon dioxide monitors in all buildings, from schools to offices. They cost about $100 and let you know if there are high levels of carbon dioxide in the air – that’s usually an indication of poor ventilation, so the monitors could help warn you about potentially dangerous conditions.
“If we had dealt with all these ventilation infiltration problems before the pandemic…we might have had less closures, less lock downs – we might have had less people die,” said Pistochini. “Poorly ventilated buildings increase the infection rate.”
Source: NBC
