“Everyday Clean Air” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

When the next pandemic hits our ability to stop it will depend on the infrastructure we already have in place. A key missing piece is clean indoor air. An airborne pathogen can be very hard to contain, and we would want to move fast to limit spread. But how quickly we can get measures in place, and how thoroughly they would work, depends critically on the base we have to build up from. Indoor air today is dirty by default. The air you breathe in is air others have breathed out, complete with a wide range of viruses and bacteria. It's a little gross if you think about it, and people do get sick a lot, but most of the time we just accept the downsides. If something really serious were going around, though, this isn't a risk we'd accept. We'd need clean air: some combination of replacing infected air with outside air (ventilation), physically removing pathogens (purifiers, masks), or inactivating pathogens (far-UVC, glycol vapors). I hear a lot about stockpiling as a way to set us up for clean air when we most need it. Get a lot of masks, air purifiers, far-UVC [...] --- First published: November 15th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2Gv9Ki4KH2ywGhcs5/everyday-clean-air --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.