Clean air and Covid risk

You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for instance, of five prominent environmentalists who denounced lockdowns, vaccines and even masks as intolerable intrusions on our liberties, while proposing no meaningful measures to prevent transmission of the virus. Four of them became active spreaders of disinformation.

If environmentalism means anything, it’s that our damaging gratifications should take second place to the interests of others. Yet these people placed their own convenience above the health and lives of others.

Now there are even fewer excuses, as we are more aware of the costs of inaction. One of the justifications for selfishness was that liberating the virus would build herd immunity. But we now have plenty of evidence suggesting exposure does not strengthen our immune system, and may weaken it. The virus attacks and depletes immune cells, ensuring that, for some people, immune dysfunction persists for months after infection.

We also know that, with every new exposure, we are more likely to suffer adverse effects. A massive study in the US found that the risk of brain, nerve, heart, lung, blood, kidney, insulin and muscular disorders accumulates with every reinfection. The effects of long Covid, according to health metrics researchers, are “as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury”. Now that we know how the virus attacks our cells, “traumatic brain injury” looks less like an analogy than a description. The outcomes can be devastating, ranging from extreme fatigue and breathlessness to brain fog, psychotic disorders, epilepsy and dementia.

We are all playing Covid roulette. The next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. I’ve been hit three times so far, and feel lucky still to be active. But I’ve lost a little every time: stamina, lung

capacity, sleep, general fitness. In all three cases, it seems, the infection has come from school. For families with school-age children, the chamber turns more often than for those without. Yet, three years after the pandemic began, the UK government still does almost nothing to make schools safe.

There’s a powerful argument that Covid will be stopped by cleaning the air, as cholera was stopped by cleaning the water. The virus thrives in badly ventilated, shared spaces – especially classrooms. One study found that mechanical ventilation systems in classrooms reduce the infection risk by 74%.

The importance of ventilation and filtration is not lost on our lords and masters. Parliament now has a sophisticated air filter system. The same goes for the government departments where ministers work. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, there were filtration systems in every room, in some cases protecting politicians who have denied them to their own people. It’s almost as if they believe their lives are more important than ours.

The clean air standards that rich and powerful people demand for themselves should be universal, rolled out to all schools and other public buildings. Instead, while private schools have been able to invest in ventilation and filtration, state schools, many of which are close to bankruptcy, rely on strictly rationed government disbursements. It’s a classic false economy. The extra costs of healthcare caused by repeated waves of infection and the long – perhaps lifelong – impacts for many of those affected must greatly outweigh the investment in cleaner air.

But instead of taking simple and effective actions – proper (N95) masks in public places, filtration in shared spaces – we have steadily normalised a mass disabling agent. It’s likely, eventually, to reduce the number of quality years for almost everyone. Those who suffer the extreme version of this disablement, long Covid, are treated as an embarrassment we would prefer to forget.

You need only gently propose that we might return to wearing masks on public transport to provoke hundreds of people on social media to bray “freedom!” and denounce you as a tyrant.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who fails to wear a mask on public transport fails the empathy test. That would now condemn almost the entire population. But, without direction from the government and the cultural shift this could provoke, even the kindest people end up behaving as if they have no regard for others.

Of course we urgently want it to be over. But it isn’t. The virus is embedded, and will continue to mutate to avoid our defences, grinding down – unless we treat each other with respect and demand universal standards of clean indoor air – our immune systems and our health.

Do we really mean to sit and watch as this infection encroaches on our freedom to be well, winter after winter? Or do we step in where the government has failed, and normalise concern for the lives of others? Like the other moral challenges we face, this is now on us