Covid has closed schools across the country. Cleaner air can keep them open.
On a sunny afternoon in a crowded music room at East High in Denver, two sophomores practiced the violin while their music teacher, Keith Oxman, worked on a desk in an adjoining office.
Ceiling fans were turned off to keep sheet music from scattering. The windows were tightly closed. East High is the largest high school in Denver and one of the oldest, and there is no modern ventilation system.
When the pandemic hit , Mr Oxman, 65 and a cancer survivor, feared he would fall ill or pass the virus on to his 101-year-old father. He therefore left the school when it first closed in March 2020 and only returned for over a year, staying at home during subsequent virus outbreaks.
"We were supposed to have the windows open," he said. "But the windows don't open."
Poorly ventilated spaces provide ideal transmission conditions for the coronavirus, and at the height of the pandemic, schools as East High were a hot spot of controversy. An outbreak that began in November 2021 sickened more than 500 students, or about one in five, and 65 staff members, one of whom died.
The pandemic led to repeated closures of schools. tens of thousands of schools across the country. The shutdowns have plummeted school grades, disrupted the lives of millions of American families, and sparked a wave of anger, particularly among conservatives, that has not abated.
As the upcoming presidential election gathers momentum, extended school closures and remote learning have become the centerpiece of the Republican argument that the pandemic has been mishandled, the subject of repeated House of Representatives hearings and a barrage of academic papers on learning loss and mental health disorders among children.
But the scientists who study viral transmission see another lesson in pandemic school closures: if the indoor air had been cleaner and safer, they might have been avoidable. Coronavirus is an airborne threat, and Covid incidence was about 40% lower in schools that improved air quality, study finds.
The average American school building is about 50 years old. According to a 2020 analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 41% of school districts needed to update or replace heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, or about 36,000 buildings in total. .
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On a sunny afternoon in a crowded music room at East High in Denver, two sophomores practiced the violin while their music teacher, Keith Oxman, worked on a desk in an adjoining office.
Ceiling fans were turned off to keep sheet music from scattering. The windows were tightly closed. East High is the largest high school in Denver and one of the oldest, and there is no modern ventilation system.
When the pandemic hit , Mr Oxman, 65 and a cancer survivor, feared he would fall ill or pass the virus on to his 101-year-old father. He therefore left the school when it first closed in March 2020 and only returned for over a year, staying at home during subsequent virus outbreaks.
"We were supposed to have the windows open," he said. "But the windows don't open."
Poorly ventilated spaces provide ideal transmission conditions for the coronavirus, and at the height of the pandemic, schools as East High were a hot spot of controversy. An outbreak that began in November 2021 sickened more than 500 students, or about one in five, and 65 staff members, one of whom died.
The pandemic led to repeated closures of schools. tens of thousands of schools across the country. The shutdowns have plummeted school grades, disrupted the lives of millions of American families, and sparked a wave of anger, particularly among conservatives, that has not abated.
As the upcoming presidential election gathers momentum, extended school closures and remote learning have become the centerpiece of the Republican argument that the pandemic has been mishandled, the subject of repeated House of Representatives hearings and a barrage of academic papers on learning loss and mental health disorders among children.
But the scientists who study viral transmission see another lesson in pandemic school closures: if the indoor air had been cleaner and safer, they might have been avoidable. Coronavirus is an airborne threat, and Covid incidence was about 40% lower in schools that improved air quality, study finds.
The average American school building is about 50 years old. According to a 2020 analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 41% of school districts needed to update or replace heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, or about 36,000 buildings in total. .
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