Healthy buildings can help stop the spread of Covid-19 and increase worker productivity

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Any C department manager looking to lure workers back to the office has probably spent more time thinking about indoor air quality and ventilation over the past year and a half than at any other point in their lives before a pandemic.

This is because healthy buildings have become the latest lure to bring employees back to the office. When people slowly return to personal work, they are naturally concerned about how safe they will be. Companies continue to ensure that desks, computer keyboards, elevator buttons, and all other public areas are sufficiently disinfected.

Now, however, they are also paying more attention to how healthy the air in these buildings is – and the impact this can have not only on preventing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory diseases, but also on how air quality can affect cognitive functions.

“I don’t think businessmen are aware of the power of buildings to not only protect people from disease, but lead to better performance,” said Joseph G. Allen, associate professor at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard and director of Harvard Healthy. The program of buildings on CNBC Workforce Executive Council peak on Wednesday. “Greater ventilation leads to significantly better functioning of employees ‘cognitive functions. It’s good for workers’ health and productivity.”

“Dogma about drops is over”

Allen said the increased interest in air quality in buildings stems from a better understanding of how Covid-19 is expanding. Cleaning the surfaces and following the six-meter distance rule made sense when there was a belief that the virus spreads by droplets that we release when we cough or sneeze, and those droplets cannot travel longer than six meters.

In fact, Covid-19 is spreading through respiratory aerosols that travel well over six feet, Allen said. “When we talk, cough, sneeze or just breathe, we are constantly emitting respiratory aerosols of various sizes,” he added. “If we are infected, these particles carry the virus and can travel around any room and stay in the air for hours. The dogma of droplets is over.”

Insufficiently ventilated room or building means that these respiratory aerosols will accumulate and can infect someone exceeding this distance of six meters. “All the big outbreaks we’ve seen have the same characteristics,” Allen said. “Indoor time in an under-ventilated space. It doesn’t matter if it’s a spin, a rehearsal, or a restaurant. These are the same fundamental factors that drive transmission.”

Businesses can take action against this, Allen said. “Just as we have achieved great benefits in public health in terms of sanitation, water quality and food safety, indoor air quality will be part of this conversation that will continue,” he said.

Employees wear protective masks at the JLL office in Menlo Park, California, USA, on Tuesday, September 15, 2020.

David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images

Building management

The first step is for building managers to determine which systems are in place and whether they are operating as they were designed. “It seems obvious, but we often insert the equipment and then leave it for 10 or 15 years and never set it up the way we do with our cars,” Allen explained.

Increasing the amount of outside air coming into the building is another step that needs to be taken. And finally, Allen said air filters need to be upgraded to so-called MERV 13. (MERV stands for minimum efficiency reporting value.) He explained that a typical structure has a MERV 8 filter that captures about 20% of the particles in the air. The MERV 13 filter will capture about 90% or more of these particles.

Not only will these high-quality filters improve air quality to reduce the spread of viruses, but they can also help workers improve their efficiency.

Allen’s team at Harvard recently published a study that looked at workers from around the world for a year. Each had air quality sensors mounted on their desks. A custom-designed smartphone app allowed these workers to perform short tests of cognitive functions. Allen found that people with better air ventilation and lower particle levels performed significantly better on these tests than people working in areas where air quality is poorer.

“The nice thing about all of this is that healthy building strategies help protect against infectious diseases, but they’re also good for workers’ health, productivity, and performance, ”Allen said.

In his 2020 book, Healthy Buildings: How Interiors Promote Efficiency and Productivity, co-authored with Harvard Business School lecturer John D. Macomber, Allen said they show how better air quality and ventilation can lead to final profits for companies. His research at Harvard and financial simulations have shown that the benefits of higher ventilation alone are estimated at between $ 6,500 and $ 7,500 per person per year. In a April 2020 Harvard Business Review article co-authored with Macomber, Allen cites researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who estimate that improving indoor air quality in offices could add as much as $ 20 billion a year to the U.S. economy.

“Since the late 1970s, in response to the global energy crisis, we have started tightening our buildings and in the meantime suffocating the air supply to save energy,” Allen said. With this, we introduced an era of sick construction.

“It’s not surprising that we have a high level of indoor air pollution and sick buildings in which people can’t concentrate in conference rooms and are constantly sleepy at work,” he said.

And contrary to what many think, it’s not just new, modern buildings that can be health-focused. “Any building can be a healthy building and it’s not hard to do and it’s not that expensive,” he added. “I would actually argue that healthy buildings are not expensive. Sick buildings are expensive.”

To join the CNBC Workforce Executive Council, sign up at cnbccouncils.com/wec.

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