When the next pandemic hits our ability to stop it will depend on the

infrastructure we already have in place. A key missing piece is clean

indoor air. An airborne pathogen can be very hard to contain, and we

would want to move fast to limit spread. But how quickly we can get

measures in place, and how thoroughly they would work, depends

critically on the base we have to build up from.

Indoor air today is dirty by default. The air you breathe in is air

others have breathed out, complete with a wide range of viruses and

bacteria. It's a little gross if you think about it, and people do

get sick a lot, but most of the time we just accept the downsides.

If something really serious were going around, though, this isn't a

risk we'd accept. We'd need clean air: some combination of replacing

infected air with outside air (ventilation), physically removing

pathogens (purifiers, masks), or inactivating pathogens (far-UVC, glycol

vapors).

I hear a lot about stockpiling as a way to set us up for clean air

when we most need it. Get a lot of masks, air purifiers, far-UVC [...]

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November 15th, 2025

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2Gv9Ki4KH2ywGhcs5/everyday-clean-air