We Need to Improve Indoor Air Quality: Here’s How and Why

Upgrading buildings’ ventilation, filtration and other factors would not only decrease COVID transmission but also improve health and cognitive performance in general

We spend 90 percent of our lives indoors, yet most of us seldom spare a thought for the quality of the air we breathe there.

More than a century ago, pioneering nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale proclaimed the importance of open air and bedroom ventilation for tuberculosis patients. Today in Nordic countries, it is common practice to let babies nap outside, sometimes in freezing temperatures. But even though humans have long attributed health benefits to fresh outdoor air, it is a lesson many of us seemed to have largely forgotten—until the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to relearn it.

It is now widely acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, is frequently transmitted by airborne droplets called aerosols that hang in the air and can travel over short and long distances. “This is a virus that spreads through the air almost exclusively indoors. If we start there, then the building matters,” says Joseph Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and director of its Healthy Buildings program...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-improve-indoor-air-quality-here-rsquo-s-how-and-why/