Coronavirus
Technology Solutions
November 19, 2020
NY Times Article Provides Insights on Muddled
Thinking on Masks
Sanitizing Surfaces is Not as Important as CATE
Masks
Dividers are not Good Protection from COVID
M+H
Addressing the COVID Cloud with Membrane HVAC
Filters
July 15, 2020 - qlAir
interviewed on holistic approach to providing
clean air solutions for COVID
______________________________________________________________________________
NY Times Article Provides Insights on Muddled
Thinking on Masks
Apoorva Mandavilli
provided a good summary of the muddled thinking
about masks in her NY Times article
today.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-masks.htm
Here is her summary of her interview with one
doctor.
“But experts say only health care workers
require gold-standard protection. Doctors and
nurses work closely with infected patients for
prolonged periods, which significantly increases
their risk of infection with the coronavirus,
Dr. Brooks noted.
The average person, on the other hand, is
exposed to much less virus and less often, and
so can be protected with a well-made cloth
covering, Dr. Brooks said. The best cloth face
coverings, which have multiple layers that can
trap viral particles — the thickest are mostly
impervious to light — are
as effective as surgical masks in some
circumstances.
Cloth masks are also reusable and durable, and
even after regular washings, they maintain their
effectiveness. N95s and surgical masks are
usually worn once and “end up in a landfill,”
Dr. Brooks said.”
Lets apply logic and math to this analysis.
There are 200 people wearing masks in
public for
every doctor in a high risk situation.
If the risk level is 100 times higher for
the doctor the highly efficient mask will save
twice as many people if worn by the public than
by the high risk doctors.
As we pointed out in the Alert yesterday the
prevention program is like a reverse lottery.
The chances of a win from 200 people with one
ticket each are more than the doctor with 100
tickets.
The logic is even simpler. If doctors in high
risk situations can be protected by good masks
than it is even easier to protect the public
using masks of equal quality.
Here is another quote from the article “All
kinds of masks offer the wearer some degree of
protection, multiple
studies have shown. Exactly how much
protection is not yet clear.
“The protection for the wearer is not 100
percent,” Dr. Leana Wen, the former health
commissioner of Baltimore, said of cloth masks.
“That’s also why universal masking is important,
because we need the people who are infected to
be wearing it.”
N95 masks are thought to be the most effective
in this regard, followed by surgical masks. But
evidence for benefit from cloth masks is scarce.
“There haven’t been good studies on protecting
the wearer,” said Linsey Marr, an expert at
Virginia Tech on the airborne transmission of
viruses. Still, she added, most researchers
assume cloth masks provide at least some
protection.”
Nowhere in this discussion is there the
recognition that Fit is just as important as
efficiency
the article does convey that masks are
beneficial but that there have not been enough
studies to draw conclusions but logic dictates
the conclusion.
Dr. Volckens said. “And I think we all agree
that smoking causes cancer and is bad for you —
does that mean that we can’t believe that
smoking causes cancer because there isn’t a
clinical trial?” Most studies on cloth face
coverings have been observational and looked at
whether their use stopped the spread at a
community level.”
This use of logic to support mask use is weak
compared to the physics and science around the
subject already developed for masks designed for
people with health problems and those who need
protection from air pollution or wild fire
smoke. Millions of dollars has been spent on
testing and much more on mask development.
Sanitizing Surfaces is Not as Important as CATE
Masks
At Hong Kong’s deserted airport, cleaning crews
constantly spray baggage trolleys, elevator
buttons and check-in counters with antimicrobial
solutions. In New York City, workers continually
disinfect surfaces on buses and subways. In
London, many pubs spent lots of money on
intensive surface cleaning to reopen after
lockdown — before
closing again in November.
All over the world, workers are soaping, wiping
and fumigating surfaces with an urgent sense of
purpose: to fight the coronavirus. But
scientists increasingly say that there
is little to no evidence that contaminated
surfaces can spread the virus. In crowded
indoor spaces like airports, they say, the virus
that is exhaled by infected people and that
lingers in the air is a
much greater threat.
Hand washing with soap and water for 20 seconds
— or sanitizer in
the absence of soap — is still encouraged to
stop the virus’s spread. But scrubbing surfaces
does little to mitigate the virus threat
indoors, experts say, and health officials are
being urged to focus instead on improving
ventilation and filtration of indoor air.
“In my opinion, a lot of time, energy and money
is being wasted on surface disinfection and,
more importantly, diverting attention and
resources away from preventing airborne
transmission,” said Dr. Kevin P. Fennelly, a
respiratory infection specialist with the United
States National Institutes of Health.
A subway station in Hong Kong, where crews wipe
escalator handrails
with disinfected rags.
Credit...Lam
Yik Fei for The New York Times
Some experts suggest that Hong Kong, a crowded
city of 7.5 million residents and a long history
of infectious disease outbreaks, is a case study
for the kind of operatic surface cleaning that
gives ordinary people a false sense of security
about the coronavirus.
The Hong Kong Airport Authority has used a
phone-booth-like “full-body disinfection
channel” to spritz airport staff members in
quarantine areas. The booth — which the airport
says is the first in the world and is being used
in trials only on its staff — is part of an
all-out effort to make the facility a “safe
environment for all users.”
Such displays can be comforting to the public
because they seem to show that local officials
are taking the fight to Covid-19. But Shelly
Miller, an expert on aerosols at the University
of Colorado Boulder, said that the booth made no
practical sense from an infection-control
standpoint.
Viruses are emitted through activities that
spray respiratory droplets — talking, breathing,
yelling, coughing, singing and sneezing. And
disinfecting sprays are often made from toxic
chemicals that can significantly affect indoor
air quality and human health, Dr. Miller said.
“I can’t understand why anyone would think that
disinfecting a whole person would reduce the
risk of transmitting virus,” she said.
A range of respiratory ailments, including the
common cold and influenza, are caused by germs
that can spread from contaminated surfaces. So
when the coronavirus outbreak emerged last
winter in the Chinese mainland, it seemed
logical to assume that these so-called fomites
were a primary means for the pathogen to spread.
Studies soon found that the virus seemed to
survive on some surfaces, including plastic and
steel, for up
to three days. (Studies later showed that
much of this is likely to be dead fragments of
the virus that are not infectious.) The World
Health Organization also emphasized surface
transmission as a risk and said that airborne
spread was a concern only when health care
workers were engaged in certain medical
procedures that produce aerosols.
But scientific evidence was growing that the
virus could stay
aloft for hours in tiny droplets in
stagnant air, infecting people as they inhaled —
particularly in crowded
indoor spaces with poor ventilation.
In July, an essay in The
Lancet medical journal argued that
some scientists had exaggerated the risk of
coronavirus infection from surfaces without
considering evidence from studies of its closely
related cousins, including SARS-CoV, the driver
of the 2002-03 SARS epidemic.
“This is extremely strong evidence that at least
for the original SARS virus, fomite transmission
was very minor at most,” the essay’s author, the
microbiologist Emanuel Goldman of Rutgers
University, said in an email. “There is no
reason to expect that the close relative
SARS-CoV-2 would behave significantly different
in this kind of experiment,” he added, referring
to the new coronavirus.
A few days after Dr. Goldman’s Lancet essay
appeared, more than 200 scientists called
on the W.H.O. to acknowledge that the
coronavirus could spread by air in any indoor
setting. Bowing to enormous public pressure over
the issue, the agency acknowledged that indoor
aerosol transmission could lead to outbreaks in
poorly ventilated indoor places like
restaurants, nightclubs, offices and places of
worship.
By October, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, which had maintained since May that
surfaces are
“not the primary way the virus spreads,”
was saying that transmission of infectious
respiratory droplets was the “principal
mode” through which it does.
But by then, paranoia about touching anything
from handrails to grocery bags had taken off.
And the instinct to scrub surfaces as a Covid
precaution — “hygiene
theater,” as The Atlantic magazine
called it — was already deeply ingrained.
“My tennis partner and I have abandoned shaking
hands at the end of a match — but, since I’ve
touched the tennis balls that he has touched,
what’s the point?” Geoff Dyer wrote
in a March essay for The New Yorker
magazine that captured the germophobic
zeitgeist.
In Hong Kong, officials added a fleet of robots
to clean surfaces in malls
and subway cars.Credit...Lam
Yik Fei for The New York Times
From Nairobi to Milan to Seoul, cleaners in
hazmat suits have been fumigating public areas
despite W.H.O. warnings that the chemicals could
do more harm than good.
In Hong Kong, where 299 people died during the
original SARS epidemic, elevator buttons are
often covered in plastic that is cleaned
multiple times a day. Crews in some office
buildings and subways wipe escalator handrails
with disinfected rags as commuters ascend.
Cleaners have blasted public places with
antimicrobial coatings and added a fleet of
robots to clean surfaces in subway cars.
Several Hong Kong-based scientists insist the
deep cleaning can’t hurt and supported the
government’s strict social-distancing rules and
its months long insistence on near-universal
mask wearing.
Procter & Gamble said sales of its personal
cleansing products grew more than 30 percent in
the quarter that ended in September, with
double-digit growth in every region of the
world, including more than 20 percent in greater
China.
Dividers are not Good Protection from COVID
McIlvaine has showed that dividers which are not
part of laminar air flow systems are likely to
cause turbulence. Take the example below. If a
person in one booth is wearing perfume will the
partitions prevent a person in the next booth
from smelling it?
Many restaurants in Hong Kong installed dividers
between tables.
Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Hong Kong’s Covid-19 burden — more than 5,400
confirmed cases and 108 deaths — is relatively
low for any city. Yet some experts say it has
been slow to address the risks of indoor aerosol
transmission.
Early on, officials required Hong Kong
restaurants to install dividers
between tables — the same sort of flimsy,
and essentially useless, protection used
at the U.S. vice-presidential debate in October.
But as the Hong Kong authorities have gradually
eased restrictions on indoor gatherings,
including allowing wedding
parties of up to 50 people, there is a
fear of potentially new outbreaks indoors.
Some experts say they are especially concerned
that coronavirus droplets could spread through
air vents in offices, which are crowded because
the city has not yet developed a robust culture
of remote work.
“People are removing masks for lunch or when
they get back to their cubicle because they
assume their cubicle is their private space,”
said Yeung King-lun, a professor of chemical and
biological engineering at the Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology.
“But remember: The air you’re breathing in is
basically communal.”
M+H
Addressing the COVID Cloud with Membrane HVAC
Filters
Mann + Hummel is a technology leader in air
filtration.
It has initiated the concept of clean air
as a service with sophisticated monitoring and
software systems. McIlvaine
has recorded interviews on this subject
with their qlair group. They have recognized the
prevalence of COVID as a cloud which can move
through HVAC systems with a newly introduced H13
PTFE membrane filter for HVAC systems. McIlvaine
has been advocating the upgrade of filter
systems.
The MANN+HUMMEL Group offers operators of air
conditioning and ventilation systems in
buildings a new HEPA H13 air filter in
accordance with EN 1822, which reliably filters
more than 99.95 percent of viruses, bacteria and
micro-organisms from the supply air. Throughout
the winter months, the Nanoclass Cube Pro
membrane enables a return to systems using
energy-efficient circulation air modes.
Infectious virus particles that can attach to
aerosols, such as SARS-CoV-2, are thus reliably
filtered out. Now is the time for facility
managers and service companies to prepare their
air conditioning and ventilation systems
accordingly, because the risk of infection
increases as soon as people spend more time
indoors again during the cold season. Air
conditioning systems that run in a circulatory
mode further facilitate this.
The filter offers numerous advantages, not least
thanks to MANN+HUMMEL’s decades of expertise in
air filtration in cleanrooms and operating
theatres: It is energy efficient and its new
ePTFE medium reduces the pressure drop by 50
percent compared to conventional HEPA air
filters based on micro glass fibers. Combined
with the MANN+HUMMEL Airpocket Eco filter in
energy efficiency class A+, the usual operating
cost of a ventilation or air conditioning system
barely differs compared to a “pre-Corona”
configuration of filters. Moreover, the
Nanoclass Cube Pro membrane meets the
requirements of fire protection class E
according to EN 13501. Since the air filter is
offered in various standard dimensions, it can
be used in almost any HVAC system without
problem and without having to convert systems.
With the Nanoclass Cube Pro Membrane for central
AC and ventilation systems, MANN+HUMMEL is
expanding its portfolio of solutions for
virus-free indoor air in buildings. It is thus
positioning itself as a development partner and
complete supplier for air hygiene. The mobile
air purifiers of the OurAir product line are
also part of the program. The antiviral
solutions are building blocks for the path back
to the social and economic life before Corona.
The filter medium is a PTFE membrane
Advantages
·
Offers the highest separation efficiency at half
the operating pressure difference compared to
conventional HEPA* air filter media based on
micro glass fiber technology
·
Its robust and moisture resistant construction
gives longevity and great value for money
·
Fire protection standards meet regulations EN
15423 or VDI 3803-4
·
Provides total protection against viruses even
in circulation mode
·
Thanks to the low operating pressure
difference, no changes to the system parameters
are necessary
·
Standardized dimensions allow for use in
virtually any system
At
its facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina,
two production lines have been converted to
produce daily protective grade (non-certified)
face masks with a time-to-market of 15 days.
Initially, the product will be supplied to
MANN+HUMMEL employees to protect those keeping
the company moving forward. As production ramps
up, the masks also will be sold to customers.
Globally, MANN+HUMMEL began 2020 with zero face
mask production, and now anticipated that by May
1, more than 5 million face masks would be
produced per month.
A box of 40 spun bond single layer
disposable masks can be purchased for $27
from the M+H website.
Mann + Hummel is a filtration leader with 2019
sales in excess of EUR 4.2 billion.
July 15, 2020 - qlAir
interviewed on holistic approach to providing
clean air solutions for COVID
Ellie Amirnasr and Marcel
Schoch are spearheading a holistic approach to
provide clean air as a service. The new
requirement to address COVID makes this effort
even more important. qlAir is an entity within
Mann + Hummel. The company name is pronounced as
Claire.
The holistic approach
includes sensors and monitoring, problem
identification solutions, and then continuing
evaluation of the effectiveness of the solution.
A big potential for balancing air quality
management, equipment maintenance and energy
savings lies within the broader use of sensors,
data analytics and IoT (Internet of Things).
Continuous air quality monitoring can be used to
identify critical areas and patterns in indoor
air quality and to select appropriate mitigation
solutions. Combined with tracking and analyzing
filter performance over time and the usage of an
optimized ventilation schedule based on real
data.
Ellie and Marcel explained
how measurement of particles, CO2, humidity and
other air constituents can be the basis for
providing COVID mitigation solutions which
balance effectiveness and cost. The use of
the approach in a mall was discussed. The degree
of social distancing and the percentage of
outside air in a given space can be determined
based on CO2 content. An actual case history in
a hospital was used as an example. The problem
was VOC reduction but the approach would be the
same for COVID minimization.
To view this YouTube
recording click here: https://youtu.be/T0HJF5MVDU0
McIlvaine has been writing about M+H in the
previous alerts.
Here is a search under Mann but there are
other articles under Tridim
which is an air filter company acquired
in the last few years
Search results for: mann
12 results found.
2 pages of results.
Sorted by relevance / Sort
by date
1. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... than
Countries Should be the Guiding Force China has
been Preparing for COVID since 2005 Mann+
Hummel has Filter Cubes for Public Spaces and
Even for Subways Mann +
Hummel ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 128 - 7
Jul 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-07-07/Alert_20200707.html
2. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... Coronavirus
Technology Solutions September 24, 2020 Mann +
Hummel has Acquired the Helsa Functional Coating
Business from the Helsa Group Swinburne
University Develops Electrospun Carbon Nanofiber
Mats Pall Building ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 36 - 24
Sep 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-09-24/Alert_20200924.html
3. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... 847
226 2391 or rmcilvaine@mcilvainecompany.com M +
H Cabin Filters Provide COVID Protection Mann +
Hummel has created unique cabin filters with
high particulate efficiency and incorporate gas
phase ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 25 - 8
Jul 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-07-08/Alert_20200708.html
4. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... 2020
but Steps Taken to Rebound AAF Membrane Media is
an Option for COVID Mitigation Mann +
Hummel has Unique Cabin Air Filter ProPublica
Charts the Decline of the CDC ___ ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 21 - 19
Oct 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-10-19/Alert_20201019.html
5. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... twenties
in air filtration - driving for a cleaner world
Dr. Ing. Martin Lehman MANN +
HUMMEL GmbH / Germany In medias research air
filtration is omnipresent for delivering clean ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 20 - 16
Nov 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-11-16/Alert_20201116.html
6. Coronavirus
Alerts Table of Contents
... 2020
but Steps Taken to Rebound AAF Membrane Media is
an Option for COVID Mitigation Mann +
Hummel has Unique Cabin Air Filter ProPublica
Charts the Decline of the CDC October ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 19 - 19
Nov 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/TofC.html
7. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... flow
with relatively minor increases in lifecycle
costs. Tri-Dim was acquired in 2018 by Mann +
Hummel, a world leader in automotive filtration.
Almost prophetically Mann +
Hummel ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 16 - 3
Jul 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-07-02/Alert_20200702.html
8. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... and
corrective action taken based on this knowledge.
It would seem that qlAir within Mann+
Hummel has a major opportunity to clarify what
is a chaotic situation. Ellie ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 16 - 18
Jul 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-07-17/Alert_20200717.html
9. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... COVID
the harm from poor ventilation is greatly
increased. The following success story from Mann +
Hummel qlair occurred prior to COVID but shows
the process needed to minimize COVID ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 16
Jul 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-07-15/Alert_20200715.html
10. McIlvaine
Coronavirus Market Alert
... which
is the importance of wearer protection vs wearer
transmission. The McIlvaine interviews with Mann+
Hummel and AAF covered ambient filtration at
traffic intersections and other highly polluted
outdoor ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 6 - 21
Aug 2020 - URL:
http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/coronavirus/subscriber/Alerts/2020-08-20/Alert_20200820.html
