by Emma Court
23 May 2022
Here’s the latest news from the pandemic.
- Beijing sees most cases this outbreak; lockdown angst fueled
- Paris tourism rebounds as Europeans and Americans return
Tracking Covid risk in the air
Over the past month I have been carrying around a palm-sized, $150 carbon-dioxide monitor to assess how risky spaces are during the latest omicron surge.
I took the device with me to a family Passover seder in Illinois, wine tastings in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
And I learned that, most of the time, the places I went were poorly ventilated.
Carbon-dioxide monitors can assess how Covid-risky a space is because they help tell you whether you’re breathing in clean air. They measure the concentration of carbon dioxide, which people exhale when they breathe, along with other things like, potentially, virus particles. The more well-ventilated a space, the lower the reading on my monitor’s screen — meaning not only less carbon dioxide but also less of the stuff like Covid that might make people sick.
One place I didn’t expect this to be an issue was airplanes, because you hear so much about their top-of-the-line air quality systems. But in fact, some of the highest carbon dioxide readings on my travels were taken on flights, specifically during the boarding process.
It turns out that during boarding and deplaning, air systems aren’t typically running. Those periods are risky because people are mingling more than they do during a flight, says Joe Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who carries around his own CO2 monitor.
“We’ve been warning about this,” Allen says.
Fresh air is important for our health in ways that go well beyond Covid, but it’s also largely invisible. Carbon-dioxide monitors can change that.
But they also aren’t perfect, and can’t tell you everything. Carrying the CO2 monitor with me didn’t, for instance, stop me from getting Covid. You can read more about that in our full story here. — Emma Court