An anonymous friend to whom I sent this post writes:
He has a good point that most people just want to do the universal “safety” precautions. I think a big reason that he doesn’t mention is that reasonable precautions are how all businesses defend themselves from lawsuits (e.g. sexual harassment and DEI training); as long as they take the reasonable precautions, then they are immune from lawsuits. But I don’t buy “safety” as an explanation for what policies are possible. It sounds like a just-so story for why we are in the mess that we are in. Vaccines are available and thus a reasonable precaution because the government subsidized them. Respirators and HVAC filters could have been a reasonable precaution if governments had subsidized and encouraged them. I think better leadership could have made a difference.
I wish the federal government made it patriotic to make PPE and safety retrofits. They should have announced programs to set up melt blown respirator manufacturing in America. They should have made a tax credit (like the solar tax credit) for retrofits that improve ventilation in retail or offices.
I think it is plausible that simple ventilation (open a window) could have been a common precaution like masks were. However there are a few reasons why serious ventilation (like HEPA filters) could not have been subsidized like vaccines were.
Everybody agreed at the start that vaccines were the ultimate goal, ventilators would have needed to build consensus at a time when they were unavailabile.
Vaccines only needed money from the government, ventilation would require much more infrastructure (approving ventilation plans on a per building level)
Universal ventilation is much more expensive than vaccines, and for the reasons described in the post non-universal solutions weren’t of interest.
I think there is a potential path where it could have happened but i think any such plan to implement would need to address these challenges head on. The reason no government could subsidize ventilation is not because of stupidity but because these pressures were too strong.
An anonymous friend to whom I sent this post writes:
I think it is plausible that simple ventilation (open a window) could have been a common precaution like masks were. However there are a few reasons why serious ventilation (like HEPA filters) could not have been subsidized like vaccines were.
Everybody agreed at the start that vaccines were the ultimate goal, ventilators would have needed to build consensus at a time when they were unavailabile.
Vaccines only needed money from the government, ventilation would require much more infrastructure (approving ventilation plans on a per building level)
Universal ventilation is much more expensive than vaccines, and for the reasons described in the post non-universal solutions weren’t of interest.
I think there is a potential path where it could have happened but i think any such plan to implement would need to address these challenges head on. The reason no government could subsidize ventilation is not because of stupidity but because these pressures were too strong.