This book was first published in April 2020, just a few months after the first Covid-19 case was detected in the U.S. Little did Allen know at the time that this thinking would become even more relevant. “We have not designed, maintained, or operated our buildings with health as the North Star. This has been well documented. But now with Covid, it became obvious that the way you operated your building determined whether people got sick or not and for many businesses determined whether they could stay open,” he said in an interview.
We’ve lived with ‘sick building syndrome’ for over four decades, and the clean air conversation now needs to expand beyond particulate matter (PM) and include viruses and bacteria. Even more interesting are proposals that PM plays a direct role as a “carrier” of SARS-CoV-2, yet another surprising convergence of environmental and human health.
The White House recently posed some calls to action to improve indoor air quality, starting with reducing disease transmission as we move indoors this fall and winter. More on this in the next issue!
The EPA is also thinking about this, and recently put out a request for comments on clean air. The EPA and other agencies are looking to improve our pandemic preparedness. But disappointingly, the agency has not yet made a statement about Far UV-C. Would you like to let them know? You can share your comments here.
The Changing Risk Mitigation Landscape
Aside from cranking up the filtration devices or braving winter open windows, a number of new solutions have recently stepped into the limelight.
At Population we’re especially excited about Far UV-C technology, the core of our first products. Far UV-C technology has made radical advances in the past two years. This human-safe germicidal light (filtered 222 nm) has now been cited by the White House, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and several other respected agencies and organizations. This was not the case before the pandemic.
While regulation in the space still lags, just over a year ago the professional association ACGIH, who has established safe exposure guidelines, increased the threshold limit values (TLVs) by 10X for the eyes and 25X for the skin. Thanks in part to new pandemic-spurred research, they’ve gotten comfortable with people being around vastly increased levels of filtered 222 nm irradiance (closer distances or for longer periods of time), demonstrating increased confidence in Far UV-C for uses in occupied indoor environments. Will this cap get updated yet again? Time will tell.
Trailing these updates are a couple other exciting scientific wins: Ewan Eadie’s research that Far-UVC (222 nm) Efficiently Inactivates an Airborne Pathogen in a Room-Sized Chamber and Columbia University’s New Type of Ultraviolet Light Makes Indoor Air as Safe as Outdoors which shows, “Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount of active microbes in the indoor air to almost zero, making indoor air essentially as safe as outdoor air.” The New York Times also published a powerful scientist-led op-ed titled “We Have the Technology to Stop Superspreading without Masks,” and other mainstream news outlets are starting to make mention of Far UV-C.
