Getting Smarter About Buildings in the Age of Pandemics and Climate: How Data and AI Can Take Us From “One Size Fits All” to Better Decisions

"...This is a symptom of a number of problems we face as humanity. These include Covid-19, climate change, and global inequality. These problems:

• Are invisible
• Involve exponential behavior dynamics
• Involve actions that play out over long chains of cause-and-effect in time and space
• Involve complex systems interactions including feedback and winner-take-all mechanisms
• Can only be solved with great science and data."

If annual averages were the only information we considered, 79 AD in Pompeii was a slightly warmer year than usual—hardly a situation worthy of serious concern. As you can see with this example, averages, when assessing outlier risks, often make very bad metrics.

"...the temperature of 95°F is such a value. Stay below it, and very few people die. Rise above it and people start dying, and the higher the temperature rises, the greater the mortality. The chart below shows why a 5.7°F rise in average temperature over 50 years can lead to such deadly results."

The agency has not fully reckoned with airborne transmission of the coronavirus in settings like hospitals, schools and meatpacking plants, experts said.

"In the last three decades, we’ve seen a massive change in marketing. It used to be that “one size fits all” television advertisements sent to the entire country at a time were very expensive. In contrast, today, we can spend much less money on a simple Google, Facebook, or Twitter ad that only appears on the screen of people who are likely to want to purchase the product or service. Once a pipe dream, this “one-to-one” advertising model is now standard practice worldwide....

However, this revolution in data and AI technology has not been, by and large, applied to the most impactful problems of our time, including Covid-19 and climate change. We see guidelines issues by federal and state authorities that have the same “one size fits all” character, reminiscent of television ads of the 1970s. Data about Covid-19 and climate is presented in summary statistics characterizing entire states or counties, and is often averaged out over long time periods, thereby losing its power."

"Evidence gathered this fall around the world and in the U.S. suggests that schools can open, even in conditions of wide community spread, and achieve low and even near zero transmission in the school building. This evidence, combined with the benefits to learners of in-person schooling and harms of remote schooling, suggests that the time has come to pursue in-person learning across most school contexts, provided that the school in question has established reasonable infection control protocols to safeguard student, educator (including paraprofessionals), and staff safety. The federal governments should include investments in school infection control in the next coronavirus relief package.

...The most important elements of infection control that matter are:

• universal masking (including while speaking)
• hand and bathroom hygiene
• achieving 4-6 air changes per hour of 'clean' air through any combination of ventilation and filtration (or outdoor classrooms)
• 3 ft social distancing for young learners at all levels of community spread
• 6ft social distancing for high schools when levels of community spread rise above 100/100,000 daily new cases; 3ft social distancing below that level
• robust quarantine policies and contact tracing practices
• and, where feasible, surveillance/screening testing, also discussed below under “testing.”

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(boldface mine)

The project involves an environmental monitor small enough to fit on a desk that tracks air quality and ventilation; a wrist monitor that tracks sleep and physical activity; and an iPhone app that feeds researchers real-time data.

"Today there are over 55 million documented COVID-19 cases and over 1.3 million deaths, impacting countries and territories worldwide. As vaccines are developed and countries implement recovery plans, regional authorities lack the ability to test “what if” intervention plans that optimize COVID-19 mitigation strategies while reducing the economic and social impacts."

"From office workers to students, Americans facing colder weather and more time inside have a pressing question: How can they keep safe amid a pandemic that scientists say thrives in indoor settings?

The search for answers has prompted a new look at what architects and their buildings can do to help, both now and in the future."

Although a large volume of research has been done on the epidemiology of the virus, no single efforts have integrated infection, human movement, and facility engineering modelling which can be instantly applied to workspaces. Creating this holistic view has been a key product of our prototype development.

Earlier this year, two diners at a South Korean restaurant were infected with novel coronavirus in a matter of minutes from a third patron who sat at least 15 feet away from them. The third patron was asymptomatic at the time. After dissecting that scene from June, South Korean researchers released a study last month in the Journal of Korean Medical Science that suggests the virus, under certain airflow conditions, travels farther than six feet and can infect others in as little as five minutes. …
The study confirms, says Milton [Donald Milton, professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health], that infected people “can shed virus into the air, and it can travel long distances, and the more air movement you got, the more you might have” the kind of scenario laid out in the South Korean restaurant study.
With more the 20 years of experience in his field, Milton doesn’t think it’ll be another 100 years before the United States experiences a pandemic similar to the one we’re living through now. As such, he would like to see governments and entrepreneurs invest in technology to make buildings and public spaces safer in the future.

"...the specific design of a building’s interior (along with other factors such as the HVAC system) can create invisible “hot zones” where concentrations of airborne agents, such as pathogens, CO, CO 2 , and radioactive decay products, for example, can be considerably higher than average levels measured elsewhere in the building."

THIS IS THE CHALLENGE OF YOUR LIFETIME. Maybe you're thinking..."that's a job for #epidemiology", and you're right, in part...

"...our objective is to advise business leaders on what they can do to prevent COVID-19 transmission through their facilities, hence we needed a model for how infection spreads within indoor spaces. Although we can see that a large volume of research has been done on the epidemiology of the virus, no single efforts have integrated infection, human movement and facility engineering modelling which can be instantly applied to workspaces. Creating this holistic view has been a key product of our prototype development."

Informed by insights from the WELL Building Standard—the world’s premier standard for advancing health and well-being in the places where we spend our lives—the WELL Health-Safety Rating accommodates all space types as well as the specific goals and concerns of different organizations and facilities.