It's amazing that this seems surprising to people after COVID.
Next up:
* Air purifiers in schools cut parent's sick days too (not just "I need to care for my kid" days - "parent is sick" and "childless coworker of parent is sick" sick days)
* Air purifiers in strategic locations (high density offices, public transit, schools, ...) cut sick days across the population.
I think this will be our generations "realizing that washing your hands before surgery makes patients die less", and it's quite embarrassing that with all the knowledge about viral transmission we couldn't figure this out before the pandemic, and even more embarrassing that we couldn't figure it out immediately after we tested many of these things at a large scale.
The challenge isn't just "figuring it out"; the challenge is also actually putting it in place even knowing that. Because, astonishingly, there seem to be actual people against the concept of air purification. (Just read through this comments section.)
There were doctors and surgeons against the concept of handwashing, too, but fortunately they lost. Unfortunately, it took a long time for them to lose, and a lot of people died as a result. How do we skip that part?
It was more thinking that made no logical sense and was a bit of personal insult. Remember, the leading scientific theory at the time was that illness was caused by bad air. It would be the same as you suggesting to your doctor today that he wouldn't have killed his patient if he was wearing more deodorant. He would both think you are completely crazy and insulting.
If you had evidence showing that it seems to work, then whether the mechanism of action was understood yet or not, they shouldn't be perceiving it as crazy or insulting; they should be doing it, and in parallel seeking to understand it.
(It's also possible for a study to be flawed, but even then, the reaction should be to do better, not to react with "crazy and insulting".)
Those are definitely dangerous patterns. Another dangerous one doesn't even perfunctorily start with "if this were true", but instead starts with dismissal as a perceived status-challenge ("Bah, why would we do a low-status thing?")
> some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it
The common thread in all of these, though, is not embracing a fundamental mindset of "If I'm wrong I want to know that and change and improve".
Yeah and we’re also going to end up with decades worth of dead and disabled people to end this willful ignorance/malicious stupidity. The “COVID is over” crowd already demonstrated this. Bad ideas rarely die until all or most of the people who have them do. And even then, only sometimes!
This is downvoted because it is true but inconvenient. Humans tend to prioritize feelings over facts - just like with handwashing, "if this were true, I'd have killed people, therefore it is not true."
«Air purification» interpreted as "destroying all life in the air you breathe"? That would be an extraordinary claim and you would have to prove that it is a good idea.
("Air purification" can be interpreted to be about chemical and mechanical qualities, before the consideration of the living entities in the air.)
No, you got confused there. The point is "what kind of air purification" should we pursue. Correctly you wrote that it should be probably that of the study - but the submission does not say what it is... Rotating mallets? HEPA? Death rays? Carbon?
> Is this sarcasm? Do you want ‘extra’ life inside your body
Not at all: perfectly serious. We are in a system surrounded by living entities - some innocuous, some threatening, some helpful, some being the threatening food of helpful ones...
Your body already hosts living entities that live with you symbiotic. Some of them have the extremely important role to keep the worse others at bay through geopolitical control (you remove them, the damaging ones have free course...).
There are many more things around you than «tapeworms and other parasites». And they could be active part of a system (which could get unbalanced without a part).
So: before stating e.g. that all other life (e.g. in the air) should be wiped out, an intellectual inquiry about the model must be given. You do not embrace what superficially sounds like a good idea.
> We want to destroy microbes (and viruses) in specific contexts, not indiscriminately.
Apart from the known useful ones, like gut flora: no, we really do want to destroy them indiscriminantly. We bleach surfaces to do this, we can bleach air too.
Let's be a little more cautious and observant in our approach to antimicrobial stewardship.
Yes, we can bleach surfaces, but pathogens (in relatively rapid terms) develop resistance [0].
Yes, we can reduce bacteria at factory farms to small numbers with the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in animal feed, but it's easy to observe that this trains pathogens to avoid our most powerful chemical antibiotics.
And so it is with fomites, respiratory pathogens, STDs, and probably even with measures to control arboviruses.
We live in an ecological balance, and discretion is the better part of valor with regard to ensuring that this ecology becomes more likely to nurture increasingly better health outcomes.
Next up:
* Air purifiers in schools cut parent's sick days too (not just "I need to care for my kid" days - "parent is sick" and "childless coworker of parent is sick" sick days)
* Air purifiers in strategic locations (high density offices, public transit, schools, ...) cut sick days across the population.
I think this will be our generations "realizing that washing your hands before surgery makes patients die less", and it's quite embarrassing that with all the knowledge about viral transmission we couldn't figure this out before the pandemic, and even more embarrassing that we couldn't figure it out immediately after we tested many of these things at a large scale.