Engineering solutions may work better on coronavirus | Guest Opinion

Fighting the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has not gone well. If you’re a political junkie, this pandemic’s spread has demonstrated the failure of political leadership — not shutting down all travel early enough, dismantling the pandemic office, not invoking the defense authorization act, not putting a national mask-mandate in place, and generally not believing in medical science.

However, there is an alternative explanation than a simple left-right narrative. Political solutions fail to account for American culture. Using social controls, like social distancing and mask use, to slow the spread of the virus until we find the vaccine has two glaring problems.

First, Americans are not good at following rules. The countries that have been the most successful at fighting COVID-19 follow the rules — either by a government willing to enforce strict rules, like China, or having strong cultural norms, like South Korea, Japan and northern Europe.

Second, the strategy is based on creating a highly effective vaccine. This usually requires having a one to two-year advanced notice that the virus is coming in order to develop low-cost effective vaccines. This strategy ignores the fact that vaccines are not that good with viruses because viruses evolve around vaccine defenses. That is why we have yearly flu shots with an effectiveness between 20% and 60%.

But there is an older solution. Water-borne epidemics were stopped over the last hundred years by building clean water and sewer systems. Malaria has been slowed by killing mosquitoes that transmit the disease to humans through draining stagnant water, by using window screens and insecticides or rendering them infertile using low levels of radiation.

Engineering solutions are responsible for stopping most pandemics and most of the increases in life expectancies. Engineering solutions to contaminated water did not require social controls.

Medicines, other medical treatments and vaccines become the backup squad, which is something they’re good at.

SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus transmitted from person to person; thus, how fast the disease spreads depends upon how many people an infected person comes in contact with. If the disease multiplication rate is above one, a pandemic occurs because more than one person catches the disease for every person with the disease.

For a virus aboard mass transit, every day is party day at the bar because people are crowed together face to face — maximizing disease transmission from one person to the next.

So an engineering fix is needed — clean filtered air so we do not breath in each other’s mucosal particles. The solution does not need to be perfect. It just needs to get the multiplication rate of the virus below one.

It’s no secret how the virus spreads. Air goes horizontally between people — the loading ramp between an airplane and the terminal at airports, from the front of the bus or subway car backward, or down the school hallway. We need filtered air that goes up or down so we each have our own clean air supply in crowded environments.

This is not rocket science. Many factories generate hazardous gases but workers are safe a few feet away because of how the ventilation systems are designed to pull hazardous air away from people. Air comes in at the top near the ceiling, through a filter, through a fan and horizontally out at floor level.

Circulate all the air in a room through filters every few minutes. Airplanes already have filters that stop viruses, but the ventilation is designed to mix air over several rows of seats. New cabin mockups have shown how to supply clean filtered air to every passenger with filtered air entering under the seat and exiting above each seat.

Engineering solutions have three significant advantages: (1) they work against all air-borne diseases and not just this particular virus, (2) you do not need to know a year in advance what virus is coming to develop a test and vaccine and (3) tight social controls are not needed, something that this pandemic demonstrated as incompatible with our present American culture.

This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 10:38 AM with the headline "Engineering solutions may work better on coronavirus | Guest Opinion."