I might later write a more indepth post, but for now the core idea. Controling a building to have between 50% and 60% humidity might reduce the amount of spread of corona. There are multiple studies that you can reduce the spread of infections in schools and hospitals that way.
There was also a paper out that suggested COVID-19 to spread less in climates with high moisture and temperature.
If anyone wants to collaborate with me on writing a post about this, please contact me.
Can you link whatever you have on this, even before you write it up? Articles, the paper you mentioned, the studies about reducing infections this way, where you get the idea in general?
(Everyone, please do this! It is really helpful, and it’s probably easier for you to re-find things than for people to try to find them based on your comment! I wish LW had a rule about doing this!)
I think it would be really stupid to have such a rule that you should have to put effort into asking for help to write a post.
I think downvoting a post that asks for help to flash out a given case more because the post doesn’t flash out the case enough is rather demotivating to the actual production of the case getting written up.
But since you stated that you had a source already, I don’t see how it’s asking much for you to post a link to the source you already said you had.
[EDIT: After a couple days, I regret the tone of my comments here. I don’t want to discourage anybody from writing posts, or asking for help in composing posts. And I think “there oughta be a rule” was a poor summary of my position and sounded pretty hostile. I think it would be nice if people mentioning the existence of sources would link the sources they mention, and in general I’d like it if people linked source more often. But that wasn’t really directed at you personally, it was spillover from elsewhere.]
If you are wondering what the typical humidity is where you live, note that almost any build that is 10 deg F or more warmer than its surrounding because it is heated will have relative humidity (which is what parent means by “humidity”) well below .6.
Relative humidity is expensive to control partly because it is expensive for an automated system to measure. My guess is that on the margin, distributing fresh surgical masks to everyone entering the building would be much cheaper (and more effective) even when we adjust for the fact that an emergency ramp-up of mask production is much more expensive than normal, “peacetime” mask production. (I added “on the margin” to adjust for the fact that surgical masks are most efficiently produced in a facility that can supply many orders of magnitude of buildings.)
Measuring humidity is cheap. You only have to pay 2,86 € for the cheapest one on Amazon. Automated systems are more expensive but even a non-automated system could do the job with a bit on manual effort.
Effort-wise I think it’s less effort to do manual humidity control then to wear a surgical mask. My first experience with wearing a surgical mask for longer was to wear it 5 hours for a SlateStarCodex meetup I organized for the 8.3. Afterwards, I had a headache and didn’t wear my masks in a meeting the next day even through I’m a well-prepared rationalist who brought his masks a year in advance.
Comparing it to mask wearing however misses the point. It’s quite likely that we want to do multiple interventions to keep down infection rates.
I might later write a more indepth post, but for now the core idea. Controling a building to have between 50% and 60% humidity might reduce the amount of spread of corona. There are multiple studies that you can reduce the spread of infections in schools and hospitals that way.
There was also a paper out that suggested COVID-19 to spread less in climates with high moisture and temperature.
If anyone wants to collaborate with me on writing a post about this, please contact me.
Can you link whatever you have on this, even before you write it up? Articles, the paper you mentioned, the studies about reducing infections this way, where you get the idea in general?
(Everyone, please do this! It is really helpful, and it’s probably easier for you to re-find things than for people to try to find them based on your comment! I wish LW had a rule about doing this!)
I think it would be really stupid to have such a rule that you should have to put effort into asking for help to write a post.
I think downvoting a post that asks for help to flash out a given case more because the post doesn’t flash out the case enough is rather demotivating to the actual production of the case getting written up.
For what it’s worth, I upvoted your comment.
But since you stated that you had a source already, I don’t see how it’s asking much for you to post a link to the source you already said you had.
[EDIT: After a couple days, I regret the tone of my comments here. I don’t want to discourage anybody from writing posts, or asking for help in composing posts. And I think “there oughta be a rule” was a poor summary of my position and sounded pretty hostile. I think it would be nice if people mentioning the existence of sources would link the sources they mention, and in general I’d like it if people linked source more often. But that wasn’t really directed at you personally, it was spillover from elsewhere.]
This suggests that a humidity between 50-60% is optimal https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2863430/
If you are wondering what the typical humidity is where you live, note that almost any build that is 10 deg F or more warmer than its surrounding because it is heated will have relative humidity (which is what parent means by “humidity”) well below .6.
Relative humidity is expensive to control partly because it is expensive for an automated system to measure. My guess is that on the margin, distributing fresh surgical masks to everyone entering the building would be much cheaper (and more effective) even when we adjust for the fact that an emergency ramp-up of mask production is much more expensive than normal, “peacetime” mask production. (I added “on the margin” to adjust for the fact that surgical masks are most efficiently produced in a facility that can supply many orders of magnitude of buildings.)
Measuring humidity is cheap. You only have to pay 2,86 € for the cheapest one on Amazon. Automated systems are more expensive but even a non-automated system could do the job with a bit on manual effort.
Effort-wise I think it’s less effort to do manual humidity control then to wear a surgical mask. My first experience with wearing a surgical mask for longer was to wear it 5 hours for a SlateStarCodex meetup I organized for the 8.3. Afterwards, I had a headache and didn’t wear my masks in a meeting the next day even through I’m a well-prepared rationalist who brought his masks a year in advance.
Comparing it to mask wearing however misses the point. It’s quite likely that we want to do multiple interventions to keep down infection rates.