Far-UVC probably would have a large effect if a particular city or country installed it.
But if only a few buildings install it, then it has no effect because people just catch the bugs elsewhere.
Imagine the effect of just treating sewage from one house, and leaving all the untreated sewage from a million houses untreated in the river. There would be essentially no effect.
Yes, certain places like preschools might benefit even from an isolated install.
But that is kind of exceptional.
The world isn’t an efficient market, especially because people are kind of set in their ways and like to stick to the defaults unless there is strong social pressure to change.
Ah, OK. So the claim is that the isolated effect (one building, even an office or home with significant time-spent) is small, but the cumulative effect is nonlinear in some way (either threshold effect or higher-order-than-linear). That IS a lot harder to measure, because it’s distributed long-term statistical impact, rather than individually measurable impact. I’d think that we have enough epidemiology knowledge to model the threshold or effect, but I’ve been disappointed on this front so many times that I’m certainly wrong.
It, unfortunately, shares this difficulty with other large-scale interventions. If it’s very expensive, personally annoying (rationally or not), and impossible to show an overwhelming benefit, it’s probably not going to happen. And IMO, it’s probably overstated in feasibility of benefit.
Far-UVC probably would have a large effect if a particular city or country installed it.
But if only a few buildings install it, then it has no effect because people just catch the bugs elsewhere.
Imagine the effect of just treating sewage from one house, and leaving all the untreated sewage from a million houses untreated in the river. There would be essentially no effect.
If you installed it in a preschool and it successfully killed all the pathogens there wouldn’t be essentially no effect.
Yes, certain places like preschools might benefit even from an isolated install.
But that is kind of exceptional.
The world isn’t an efficient market, especially because people are kind of set in their ways and like to stick to the defaults unless there is strong social pressure to change.
Ah, OK. So the claim is that the isolated effect (one building, even an office or home with significant time-spent) is small, but the cumulative effect is nonlinear in some way (either threshold effect or higher-order-than-linear). That IS a lot harder to measure, because it’s distributed long-term statistical impact, rather than individually measurable impact. I’d think that we have enough epidemiology knowledge to model the threshold or effect, but I’ve been disappointed on this front so many times that I’m certainly wrong.
It, unfortunately, shares this difficulty with other large-scale interventions. If it’s very expensive, personally annoying (rationally or not), and impossible to show an overwhelming benefit, it’s probably not going to happen. And IMO, it’s probably overstated in feasibility of benefit.