The glowing box, pulsing with rainbowy light, looks as if it was dropped into this Studio City living room from a warehouse rave.
It came, in fact, from the garage where Alex LeVine has been tinkering with fans, filters and tape, trying to bring a bit of fun to a simple tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The mesmerizing device uses fans and filters to pull contaminants — including smoke, dog dander and the unwelcome coronavirus — out of indoor air.
It can also flash in time to the sounds of Phil Collins. “In the Air Tonight,” of course.
“People aren’t embracing any of the other things that can avert disaster in this pandemic,” said LeVine, a 49-year-old cannabis company executive with an electrical engineering degree who started building trippy do-it-yourself filtration boxes as a hobby. “Maybe I can create a way to clean the air that people want in the middle of the room.”
As the pandemic drags on, cleaning up indoor air has become a passion project not just for aerosol scientists and epidemiologists, but for a grab bag of concerned citizens like LeVine.
In San Francisco, parents mobilized to fund and build simple devices for classrooms. On Twitter, one woman consulted experts about how many she should assemble for an indoor wedding in Ontario. University volunteers have gathered to build them in San Diego, Arizona and Connecticut.
It has been rewarding “to be able to feel like you’re being proactive and that you’re rolling up your sleeves against the virus — that you’re not just passive, but you’re actually able to trap it in a filter and to go after it,” said Marina A. Creed, a neuro-immunology nurse practitioner at UConn Health who began looking into air filtration when her immunocompromised patients worried that their kids might bring home COVID-19 from school.
Students and faculty from the University of Connecticut’s schools of nursing, engineering and other fields have since assembled hundreds of the DIY cleaners with box fans, filters and duct tape for local schools. “People are hungry for something else that they can do to fight back,” Creed said.
As the BA.5 subvariant barrels through the country and many people have abandoned masks, engineers and epidemiologists have argued that more needs to be done to prevent the coronavirus from building up in stagnant air. Cleaning up indoor air has long been a neglected front in the halting battle against COVID-19, experts say.
“It’s enormously important for our health. It’s enormously important for protection against many infectious diseases. And it is completely neglected in almost every aspect” — and had been long before the pandemic, said Jeffrey Siegel, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto
Changing the air in an indoor space just five times an hour — a lower rate than the systems used for some hospital wards — can cut the risk of COVID transmission in half, researchers have found. In Italy, one analysis found that ventilation systems could reduce the risk of coronavirus infection in schools by more than 80% if the air was changed six times an hour.
Improving ventilation and air filtration may not stop someone from getting infected if they sit maskless next to a contagious…
Read More: The DIY push to rid indoor air of COVID