![]() ![]() “We've been designing our buildings for the past 40 years without human health in mind.” Interview Highlights “We've kind of stopped letting our buildings breathe, but we need to let them breathe again,” Allen says. Most offices are heated and cooled with HVAC, systems that have been designed to use minimum amounts of outdoor air. Avoid portable air purifiers with ionizers or UV light. Purchase a device with a clean air delivery rate (CADR) of 300 for every 500 square feet of room, he says. If you can’t open a window or switch out to a MERV 13 filter, Allen says to get a portable air cleaner with a HEPA filter. Typical buildings have MERV 8 filters, which only capture up to 20% of particles, whereas the MERV 13 filter can capture 80%, he says. Second, if you have a mechanical ventilation system, he says to update the filter to a MERV 13 filter. To effectively reduce the amount of tiny droplets and aerosol particles lingering in a room, Allen first recommends bringing in more outdoor air by opening up one, two or as many windows as possible. Get a portable air cleaner with a HEPA filter.Ventilation recommendations from Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program director Joseph Allen: “It doesn't stop what we really need to stop: respiratory aerosols that can carry the virus from deep in our lungs,” he says. But some studies have shown widespread overuse of plexiglass in places such as schools can impede airflow and trap infectious respiratory aerosols, Allen says. Plexiglass, for example, is OK in front of a cashier at a supermarket since they check out hundreds of people per day, he says. We've known this for a long time now,” says Joseph Allen, director of Harvard University's Healthy Buildings Program and author of " Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity."īut experts warn that not all the ventilation technologies available are useful or even safe.Įfficacy data is limited on products that claim to reduce the amount of virus in the air, Allen says, and some of these products - such as plexiglass, deep cleaners and a variety of disinfecting agents - can generate secondary pollutants. Virus transmission is “happening indoors in under-ventilated places. ![]() Find that audio here.Īmong the key questions for those returning this fall to offices - as well as gyms, theatres, restaurants and more - is whether their space is COVID-19 safe.Įxperts agree that proper ventilation can help prevent COVID-19 spread since the virus is airborne. ![]() (Jeroen Jumelet/Getty Images) This article is more than 1 year old.Įditor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on April 11, 2022. Employees working at an office in the Netherlands on June 28, 2021. ![]()
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