Good ventilation vital to COVID mitigation

The report was commissioned by government chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and published by the Royal Academy of Engineering and its partners in the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC).

It found that the importance of ventilation in mitigating against COVID-19 has been overlooked and that that pandemic has revealed flaws in the way in which buildings are designed, managed and operated.

Unless they are addressed, these could disrupt management of the current and future pandemics, impose high financial and health costs on society and hinder efforts to address challenges such as climate change.

Routes to infection included exhaled aerosols from a person’s breath, sharing air in enclosed spaces, and through touching contaminated surfaces.

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“We don’t quite know yet the relative importance of these different routes – on whether that changes in different spaces – but we do know there’s hugely growing evidence that the air matters a lot more than we thought at the outset of this pandemic,” said Catherine Noakes, Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings at Leeds University during a press briefing on July 15.