First, public health officials and elected leaders have to acknowledge that the virus is indeed airborne in aerosols, not droplets. Many studies show that as people moved indoors for the fall and gathered for holiday occasions, a spike was inevitable.

The virus can remain suspended in stagnant, unfiltered air for hours, and even brief contact with a “cloud” of the aerosols is enough to get infected. Recall that a single person at a synagogue in New Rochelle infected more than 100 congregants in 2020, shutting down the whole town. Researchers recently traced half of all Covid-19 deaths in Ireland to just 400 buildings (in a country that has 2 million buildings).

What about New York City? What if less than 1% of all our buildings were responsible for the majority of Covid-19 in New York? This is a problem we can tackle, quickly and easily, and it could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

I have personally measured the air in indoor public spaces with a carbon-dioxide (CO2) meter. I’ve found that only a few places around the city are doing what it takes to have truly safe air. I’ve also found that a small number of sites are dramatically worse than others, and they might be a good place to start to focus our efforts.

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Originally Appeared Here