When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system.
London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape.
The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay.
In 1977, a single ill passenger transmitted the flu to 72 percent of the people on an Alaska Airlines flight. The plane had been grounded for three hours for repairs and the air-recirculation system had been turned off, so everyone was forced to breathe the same air.
….wearing face masks to walk down the street and then taking them off as soon as they sit down at restaurants, which are operating at full capacity. It’s like some kind of medieval ritual, she says, with no regard for how the virus actually spreads.
..the vaccines looked like they were going to quickly end the pandemic—but then they didn’t,
We just have to reimagine how air flows through all the places we work, learn, play, and breathe.
A rule of thumb, Noakes suggested, is at least four to six complete air changes an hour in a room, depending on its size and occupancy.
The challenge ahead is cost. Piping more outdoor air into a building or adding air filters both require more energy and money to run the HVAC system.
