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- Hacker News
- Noble goal, but tell a bunch of scientists and startups that you've got a grand vision and $500 million in cash to burn, and they're always going to tell you a story about how it could be possible if you give them that money. And your sycophantic AI you use to research and vet will also always tell you there's a chance, if that's what you seem to be wanting.by jubilanti
- (commented this on the other post which gained no traction at all already:) It's good to see more money flowing towards this totally underfunded area. However I think it's an odd choice of them to focus on filtration, UV-inactivation and other things and at least from the wording on the website not on ventilation, which they sort of assume as given. They also seem to be way very focused on product development rather than awareness, public policy and lobbying. This is a typical techno-fix approach for an area where existing technologies already exist and are just held back by all types of different market failures (hard to estabilish causality, low salience, needs to be done at large scale, concentrated costs but dispersed benefits, lack of information etc.). In some way it's like funding Direct Air Capture instead of Solar & Wind but in a fictional world where Solar and Wind are already as cheap as today but have a buildout like 20 years ago.
I've written about it in more detail here: https://www.indoorco2map.com/blog.html?post=interceptFund
by aurelwu - The tricky part is that the benefit is invisible. If it works, nothing happens: people just get sick less often. That is a hard thing to sell to building owners and employers unless the evidence and standards are really solidby veunes
- It seems like implementing HEPA filters in every classrooms has the biggest effect. The kids are spreading disease, infecting their parents, who then infect their coworkers.
Nice to see they mention UV, too. Aerolamp[0] is down to ~$500. If it were $100, it'd be easy to get into offices, too. Heck, if I worked in person, I'd buy a $100 one as an employee.
by lkbm - As someone who still masks (KN95) in all indoor settings where unmasked people are present, I am all for this. Very much looking forward to seeing where it leads.by amatecha
- What is it that motivates you to continue wearing a mask?
I take note of people who are still masking, but I have compassion for their fear so I don't say anything.
by taxicabjesus - I am so tremendously excited to see this, I've had quite a few friends become permanently disabled from long covid and even have some lingering symptoms myself from my last infection and so anything to improve access and uptake of air cleaning technologies and new preventatives is amazing.by EthanFantl
- > Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?
Because it’s a lot easier to control the supply of a material that has to be actively transported into people’s houses for them to use? I struggle to take them seriously when I didn’t see this basic and fundamental difference even mentioned.
by lazyasciiart - Came here to say the same thing. It's simple to clean all the water you consume, cleaning all the air you breathe is impossible unless you want to walk around like Bane. Bizarre that they don't mention this when comparing respiratory infections to waterborne infections.by padjo
- > Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year—about 5% of their lives—sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza
This seems completely unbelievable to me. Totally outside of my personal, professional, and family experience.
by happyopossum - Being sick ~20 days per year was the norm for me before remote work (and using N95 masks after it ended). Some people are lucky, others are not. (well, "luck" actually encompasses many factors such as population density, presence/lack of children, mandatory office presence, proper infection countermeasures in public places (air filtering, aeration), and I assume sufficient sleep or not (the only time I did not get sick as often without masking was when I managed to sleep 8 hours a day for a few months))by Krssst
- No its correct, having 2 kids and rate of sickness went through the roof, same for my wife.
We also had 10+ covids to indicate how much it changes, mostly imported by kids from creche (we hit the 'right' timing with them and covid waves). What do you expect when they shared pacifiers and put fingers in mouths all the time. Or suddenly sneezing gunk all over my face when holding them.
Before kids, I was usually sick 1x a year for few days, or had 1 proper flu week and that was it, my wife even less. No it didn't visibly improve our immunity, had covid last autumn and it felt almost like for the first time, sans loss of smell and taste.
by kakacik - Are you reading “sick” as so ill that you can’t carry out your normal routine? I think they mean any symptoms.by lokar
- For my family of 5 w/ school age children I would say that is a pretty reasonable estimate, maybe even a bit low for us. There are levels of “sick” though and I would say for us most respiratory illnesses are very mild and are a minor annoyance. Where it becomes more menacing is when we have sick kids and sick parents at the same time.by mberning
- This feels about right to me. Living with kids and commuting via public transport (in a country where face masks are not common) might break 5%.by j4k0bfr
- Unbelievable in which direction?
I've had years in which most people in my immediate surroundings were sick for weeks or months (likely exacerbated by mold, school, and travel). Also years in which I never really got sick at all.
Getting sick that often is pretty debilitating.
by tibbar - This sounds roughly normal for what I came to expect back when I worked in an office with many people who had school-age kids. I had a colleague who wryly referred to his kids as "my little plague carriers".
When I stopped working in an office, I almost completely stopped getting sick.
by JoshTriplett - No kids eh?
My oldest starting preschool was one of the worst times in my life. We were sick from august to december, then january to may. Dreadful.
It got better. My youngest is 3 now and is ahead of where my oldest was due to having 2 older siblings importing illnesses for several years, and this year we finally were mostly not sick all school year. Which is to say, we were probably closer to the 15 days "materially sick" mark. I say materially sick to mean, definitely sick, though perhaps not taken out of school (due to not technically being outside of the health exclusion policy, and sometimes I only realize they were "materially" sick after they got home instead of just "passably sick given kids will basically have a lingering cough from august to may).
- My son is susceptible to these type of infections and has asthma. He missed 17 days of school last year. Even if not fatal these types of infections are miserable and have an impact on those who get them and their caretakers.by fred_is_fred
- > So, to get closer to elimination, we also need a way to reduce the virions circulating in high density environments. During COVID the world experimented with various interventions like social distancing and personal protective equipment. But to reduce transmission durably for a large number of common respiratory viruses that are perennially circulating, we need solutions that are convenient and minimally disruptive.
We think the most promising category of products that accomplish these goals are those that remove pathogens from the air, particularly in high-density environments like offices, schools, and public transit. We’ll call these air cleaning technologies (ACTs) like air filtration and far-UVC antimicrobial light.
Sounds like a pretty big challenge to me... Ok, during Covid I read that airplane-style air conditioning with nozzles above each seat and used air pumped out at ground level was pretty good in making sure "your" air didn't get mixed up with your neighbor's (masks were still mandatory however on the few flights I took during that period). But how are you going to do the same in a packed subway train in, let's say, Tokyo or New York, at rush hour? That air conditioning unit would probably have to be as heavy as the train itself, and to the passengers it would feel like a hairdryer (on cold setting) blasting at them permanently from above...
by rob74 - People can wear masks in confined spaces. It doesn't preclude the benefits of filtering the air and using Far UVC. Defense in depth. But also there are lots of spaces where filtration and UVC can really work wonders.by layla5alive
- > We surveyed attendees ahead of the symposium. One of our questions was: if this doesn’t happen in the next ~10 years, what will the primary reason be? The number one reason cited was lack of funding, followed by technical feasibility. Why hasn’t this field attracted sufficient funding, especially given the enormous societal burden?
Isn't a projected problem with technical feasibility an explanation for lack of funding?
by Null-Set - Not really. They're trying to split up potential causes of failure between:
1. "Funding" meaning: We knew what we had to do but didn't have enough money to do it; if we had, this path would have worked (though why it says "TAM" here I don't quite get);
2. "Technical" meaning: We knew what we wanted to do but couldn't quite make it work; if we had, this path would have worked
3. "Uptake"/"Regulatory" (perhaps not the most natural pairing, though I see why they're together) meaning "We couldn't get people to actually do it"/"The authorities wouldn't let us do it"; if we had, this path would have worked
But that is missing a much different type of failure:
4. "Strategy" meaning "This path does not actually lead to our goal"
It's easy to see why in marketing material they'd leave out that last one. They want to build confidence! But for a moonshot like this, especially a biological one, it's kind of silly to think that this is definitely the best way to achieve this goal. I am, personally, quite skeptical; this reads like a mashup of SV and germophobes (with apologies to, well, both of those groups). I hope it works! And I won't stand in its way. But I won't be betting my own money on it. Probably we will learn something interesting no matter what.
More generally, this is a distinction that a lot of people miss (often intentionally, if PR/marketing is involved): strategy and tactics are distinct and they can succeed or fail independently. The best execution (tactics) here will not help if the plan (strategy) is flawed. And there are numerous other examples from research, business, and of course everyone's favorite hobby subject, war, of what happens when your tactics are good but your strategy isn't, or vice versa, or any of the other combinations. And, of course, making decisions about when to pivot (switch strategies) and all those other fun topics.
- It's sad we're resorting to philanthropy to solve problems like this. $500M is chump change.
NASA spent something like $300B in today's money on the Apollo program, and Artemis has exceeded $90B already.
I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
by fny - Everything should be voluntary philantrhopy! It seems like the ideal state if people are willing to do the pro-social thing by their own volition.
Is it better if your child does their homework because they freely choose to, or is it better that they do it because you will beat them with a belt?
- There are already people dying of malnutrition, preventable disease, etc. in the third world. Half a billion dollars could do a lot of good there, instead of going towards a pipe dream to make sure people never have to miss work for the flu again.
- > I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
Never getting sick is an enabler to reaching the goal. And the goal is..?
by mpreda - What makes you think they will succeed?by rebuilder
- It’s 500m spend without guaranteed success.by SideQuark
- It's strange how much we've normalized everyone being sick for weeks every year, even though the total cost is enormousby veunes