Chapman University’s Vice President for Research, Thomas Piechota hosts Ask the Experts Virtual Town Hall: The World After COVID on Wednesday, September 1st from 9:00 – 10:00 AM PST. The event will feature Richard Florida, the world’s premier urban expert, who will discuss the global future with leading experts from US, Europe, Africa and Asia. Florida, author of The Creative Class and the New Urban Crisis, will be followed by Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in urban futures at Chapman University; Behki Mahlobo, analyst and economic researcher at the Center of Risk Analysis in Johannesburg; Li Sun, expert of Chinese cities and professor at University of Leeds; and Laure Mandeville-Tostain, senior reporter for Le Figaro in Paris.
The discussion will be moderated by Marshall Toplansky of Chapman University.
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I'd like to raise the issue of "ventilation"
It is a travesty if anyone who regards themselves as well-informed, does not know now that the WHO and the official bodies made a catastrophic error in determining that Covid spreads by contact, droplets and fomites - and that "the virus is not in the air".
In April this year they finally admitted they were wrong - spread is mostly via aerosols building up indoors. Growing numbers of experts had been trying to get some sense established, and what finally forced the officials hand was increasing numbers of "health workers" professional bodies and Unions insisting that their own members health was being compromised by this failure of official advice. It is all the worse, to fail to attend to this risk factor, in that Covid will not be the last pandemic in which aerosols are the vector; Measles and TB are aerosol-vectored and are far deadlier than Covid - imagine if something like one of them had been the 2020 novel virus! Covid is actually luckily low on the scale of deadliness, contrary to the statistically-challenged hysteria.
We actually need an Appollo project in ventilation of indoors environments, and virucidal treatment of air where the concentration of numbers of people present are too high for ventilation alone to de-risk the environment. However, the official bodies have completely ignored the implications of their own incompetence and arrogance, and continue to double down on strategies that are based on the wrong premise. What is going on in Australia right now, for example, is a travesty all the worse for the fact that many of us would have rated Australia as a country least likely to turn itself into the worst example of contemporary antiscientific slope-browed tyranny.
I have just been completely cancelled from Medium.com for daring to discuss these things! What we are dealing with here is an agenda that is completely detached from the most basic scientific foundations. "The world after Covid" is not going to be one anchored in any kind of good faith on the part of the powers that be, or allowing people to follow their intuitions about what is safe housing, transport, etc. There are two sacred-cow orthodoxies that have made Covid worse, that are not going to be killed off easily. One is the frenzy for "energy efficient" buildings, that has resulted in the "V" being left out of HVAC, because it requires energy to heat or cool outdoors air drawn in to ventilate the indoors environment. The other is planet-saving urban planning with an "unintended consequence" of crowding in inadequate housing conditions for poorer cohorts of society.
I see one bright spot on the horizon - initiatives for grassroots market-driven forcing of public-environment de-risking - by developing Apps that interface with Google Maps, and allow contributors to upload CO2 readings seamlessly from portable meters. CO2 concentration is a proxy for ventilation and hence risk of aerosol buildup. One Alexander Riccio in New York is trying to develop such an app, and he and collaborators are already posting CO2 readings for public venues. Here is the astonishing truth that is emerging. 1200ppm for CO2 has long been regarded as a healthy upper limit. It was built into regulations in the past, regulations that have been increasingly "not enforced". At 2400 ppm, cognitive function is impaired and at 4000 ppm actual permanent brain damage commences. Riccio and friends have found concentrations much higher than this in some NYC crowded bars! Meters going off the scale at 10,000! This means that 20% of inhaled air has just come out of someone else's mouth and lungs!
The horrific conclusion: "Vibrant Urbanistas" who have been pushing so much policy onto a reluctant public for decades now, are BRAIN DEAD. It goes with their territory. We need not merely conclude this from the sheer stupidity of their ideas - there is now a solid scientific reason for their intellectual shortcomings.
And the whole world has been plunged into a state of hysteria by televised panic p*rn from selected locations where planned, built-environment lunacy was responsible for the leveraging-up of contagiousness and deadliness of a respiratory virus. This massive public health "fail" is also the reason that lockdowns are so ineffective, because confining people in housing environments that are high-risk, 24/7, will actually cause deaths to some extent. And expecting a cloth mask to protect you in an environment where aerosol concentration is high, is like expecting a cloth mask to protect you from asphyxiation from exhaust fumes in a closed garage with a car engine running. I also assert that breathrough infections of vaccinated people are occurring through very high-load infections in the same high-risk indoors environments that were the problem all along. This assertion is what got finally got me cancelled from Medium.com.