[SwellJoe]

How is that new information "challenging old ventilation doctrine"? It confirms old ventilation doctrine: monitoring CO2 remains a good proxy for general air quality, including viral and bacterial threats, and reducing CO2 via ventilation reduces other threats. That's doctrine, and now it has stronger evidence to support it, and another possible explanation for why and how well CO2 is correlated with other air quality issues.

Ventilation good. CO2 bad. No challenge to old ventilation doctrine detected. (The article and the research seems much more nuanced than the silly title.)

[jefftk]

The old doctrine was that CO2 was a proxy for air quality, and the (somewhat overblown title) is about seeing CO2 additionally as having a causal effect.

For example, under the "proxy" model, if you're worried about infection risk it's sufficient to filter the air, but under the new model filtering will work less well than you'd expect because the viruses you miss will stay active longer.

[SwellJoe]

"The old doctrine was that CO2 was a proxy for air quality"

That's not accurate, though. CO2 is, on its own, an air quality concern.

It has also been known, or at least part of the conversation, since Florence Nightingale's time, that fresh air reduces infections (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9300299/). This research makes a small tweak to our understanding, but it's also something that's been suspected/suggested by others for decades.

This research isn't "challenging" anything, it's merely expanding our understanding of causation about previously observed correlations. It's good to know what's happening. It's silly to make it out to be something it's not.

[rapjr9]

One way it challenges old doctrine is that 1000ppm CO2 was considered good air quality in the past. Now it seems 800ppm or perhaps lower should be considered good air quality. They haven't tested other viruses yet (both colds and flu viruses are now considered airborne I understand, and other respiratory viruses probably are also), and each virus may react differently, so nobody actually knows yet what an optimal value is. It is even possible that the optimal CO2 value is somewhere below the current average concentration of CO2 in the air around the world when taking all airborne viruses into consideration, but nobody knows. More research is needed. But at least for covid, 1000ppm CO2 should probably no longer be considered good air quality (though replication of the study would be good.)

[WhatIsDukkha]

Your quibble with the title is addressed by reading 3-4 paragraphs into the long story.

This sort of aggressive argument obscures the meaning and intent of the actual article in favor of some kind of editorial flavoring issue.

This behavior is warranted at times but here it just argumentative for no purpose.

[francisofascii]

Honestly the OP comment was helpful for me, because I was confused I read the story wrong, or that I missed something.

[itronitron]

I think it's challenging the old ventilation doctrine which was that the people who wanted fresh air were just neurotic hypochondriacs.

[chasil]

If supermarkets and other public spaces had installed CO2 scrubbers on their ventilation output/exhaust, could we have expected to lower COVID's r-naught?

In what we did over the pandemic with masking, we drove some flu variants extinct. Is this an alternative to accomplish the same effect?

Are hospitals already doing this with existing ventilation?

[gpm]

CO2 scrubbers don't exist in an economically feasible form. Rather the trick is just ventilation, replace indoor air with ourdoor air. If supermarkets and other public spaces just installed ventilation systems that exchanged their indoor air with outdoors air (preferably with heat exchanges so as to avoid air-conditioning or heating the outdoors), it would absolutely have helped. Ignoring this very interesting study, ventilation still just flat out works to reduce the amount of covid in the air.

Increasing ventilation is unsurprisingly recommended by the CDC, the EPA, and basically every other relevant group. The EPA has a list of papers here if you're interested in scientific measurements backing this (but can I also say it's just common sense?): https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/indoor-air-and-co...