20-20 Nanometer Hindsight

It's always a good idea to ask people like me, who claim to be futurists, just how well their predictions are coming along. Even more so those of us who go so far as to say things like, "Here's what we could have and should have done, but didn't," as I did in Where is My Flying Car.

So here we are in the midst of a global pandemic, which everybody is talking about and loudly opining every which way about what we should have done, but didn't, but which most of the opiners didn't actually say anything about beforehand.

Was I any better? I think so. For example, the main thrust of the book was that we should have flying cars, as part of a geographically-distributed, non-crowded, high-energy, public-transport-free lifestyle. Much has been made recently of the fact that many of the green-inspired virtue-signaling fads ranging from crowded subways to reusable grocery bags are quite counterproductive, and amusingly have flipped from being mandatory one day to prohibited the next.

Personal flying cars are clearly a better choice than cattle-car airliners.

Here's a slightly less obvious consequence of what could have been, given we had avoided our disastrous ergophobic funk and continued to follow the Henry Adams Curve: my house, like many buildings nowadays, gets climate control from a heat pump, which in the winter is a bit more efficient that simply dumping energy into the air by simple resistance heater. But in order to get as much efficiency as possible, the system works by recycling the air, rather than continually pumping fresh air into the house. So things that people breathe out, such as CO2, build up, as I can measure using a CO2 meter.

Well, it turns out that people breathe out SARS-Cov-2 as well. That doesn't matter so much in my house, but bigger buildings where lots of people meet, ranging from restaurants to schools, and there's a lot of air being breathed at second, third, and so forth hand that didn't have to be except for ergophobia.
So yes, we should have stayed on the Henry Adams Curve and we would have been somewhat less susceptible to the rapid spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

But the one thing I particularly identified in the book which would have made a huge difference, which is blindingly glaringly obvious and on which I spent several chapters in the book: We should have developed nanotechnology.

You want an RNA sequencer in a grain of sand? Nanotech. You want a completely reliable test that you just pin to your lapel and it runs constantly (by sampling your breath)? Nanotech. You want that manufactured in 300 million quantity in two days? Nanotech. You want a mask that samples the air that you breathe in and out, but destroys (as well as counts) every coronavirus going either way? Nanotech. You want a nanomachine that mounts guard on every ACE2 receptor on your bronchial epithelial cells, destroying any virus that tries to breach them? Nanotech.
You want toilet paper by the ton? Well, do you?

A possible SARS-Cov-2 proxy

Let us presume that you wish to prevent contracting, or spreading, this virus. Obviously you should avoid those behsviors and environments most conducive to the spread. Unfortunately, our benighted experts know so little about how that works that we are forced to avoid all contact whatsoever.
What we would like is a pair of VR glasses that simply showed us the virus, in the air or on surfaces, wherever it happened to be. We don't have that. Is there a next best thing?

How it spreads

Basically we don't know. In the absence of knowledge, health experts are assuming it spreads the same way as a cold or flu. Chances are it does; but the coronavirus spreads a lot faster and further than those. 

The first thing about it is that it has a long asymptomatic incubation period, during which some of which the patient is infectious. In fact, from the statistics I've seen, something like half of those infected never show symptoms at all. So there are a lot more people walking around thinking they're fine, but actually spreading the virus.

But it's likely that's not the whole story.  People catch it from those they never touch and who never sneeze. It probably has other vectors than a normal cold. 

Choir practice

I believe the case of the Skagit Valley Chorale is instructive. After a practice session March 10, about half the choir came down with Covid-19. And yet:

In light of the coronavirus outbreak, Comstock said they greeted each singer with hand sanitizer at the door, they were individually spaced out during rehearsal, each singer used their own sheet music, and they avoided shaking hands or hugging.

Furthermore,

 “During the entire rehearsal, no one sneezed, no one coughed, no one there appeared to be sick in any way,” she said.

What did happen? Two and a half hours of singing. That's a lot of deep breathing of shared air. The infection rate among the Skagit Valley singers was extremely high, probably twice as high as on the Diamond Princess cruise ship where the passengers were cooped up together for over a month.

Bad Air

The only reasonable inference seems to be that the aerosol theory, which holds that the virus spreads not so much from visible droplets from a cough but microscopic ones perhaps containing just one virus, might be the major vector. 

The virus itself is about 0.12 μ, has a Reynolds number in air of 3e-8 and a settling velocity of 3e-4 cm/s. That's 0.0000067 mph. With any air circulation it will remain in the air indefinitely. So when people keep breathing the air in a closed space, it will build up and build up. 

We have to start thinking of the virus as a gas. My guess is that it's the elevated concentration of SARS-Cov-2 virus that led to the high infection rates. 

So what we need, to determine the danger level of a given environment, is a gas detector that measures SARS-Cov-2 virus concentration. But we don't have one.

What we do have, however, is a proxy. People also exhale CO2. And we do have CO2 detectors. 

So let me propose that a CO2 detector can be used as a worst-case measure for  SARS-Cov-2 concentration in the air. Worst-case because of course there may be many people breathing who are not spreading the virus. But if you're outside and the CO2 level is about 400 ppm, you're probably safe. If you're inside and it's 2500, open windows or turn on that attic fan. 

In other words, yes, a ventilator can save your life. But it's not necessarily the kind of ventilator people have been talking about.