Toronto: Website logs carbon dioxide levels to help assess COVID-19 risk

By Dilshad Burman

Posted Aug 23, 2022, 6:11PM EDT.

Last Updated Aug 23, 2022, 6:37PM EDT.

A new web app aims to help people assess their risk of contracting COVID-19 in a particular space by logging carbon dioxide (CO2) levels at different locations across the city.

The app was developed by a three-person team including Toronto emergency room physician Dr. Kashif Pirzada.

“Lets say you’re in a room full of people — everyone breathes out carbon dioxide. If there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in that space, that means the ventilation system is not moving it out. That means all the viruses in the air from those people is still in the air too … and the more likely you are to get COVID,” he explains.

Anyone can log CO2 levels on the Raven Clean Air app wherever they are with the help of a portable monitor and the numbers are reflected on a map. Pirzada says in broad terms, outside air has a baseline CO2 level of about 420 parts per million (ppm). For indoor air, 800 to 1,000 ppm is acceptable. Above 1,000 ppm indicates poor ventilation.

“There’s about 500 users around the world in about 10 countries now. And we have about a thousand data points around the world,” says Pirzada. “Overall we have 150 cities — In Canada, where the majority of them are, maybe 70 or 80 cities.”

Currently, information is being logged both by the general public and local volunteers like pre-med students.

“I just go on to the app and then I log in where I was, the CO2 levels and the time and the weather and [approximately] how many people are in the space, what time it is and all those different details and I just log it in and that’s it,” explains volunteer Bahja Farah.

“It’s extremely useful, especially for people with underlying conditions or someone that’s vulnerable – it really helps to know whether you should be in these areas or whether you should protect yourself in these areas,” says Sidone Grange, another volunteer.

They add that it also has many practical applications in their daily lives, like deciding which restaurant to go to or whether they feel it necessary to wear a mask in an indoor space.

In addition, Pirzada says as back-to-school season approaches, monitoring CO2 levels in school will be very useful.

“CO2 is a way to tell if your school’s ventilation for your child is good. So you can share that data with other parents and you can prevent your child from getting COVID potentially,” he says. “That’s a big win because in hospitals where I work, the last wave was driven by kids getting sick, getting their parents sick, getting their grandparents sick. These people fill the hospitals and collapse the healthcare system. So getting this information out there is extremely important right now.”..

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/08/23/carbon-dioxide-monitoring-app-covid-19-prevention/