Meanwhile, others say that if we are fighting an airborne disease, we should also be focusing on air quality.
Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells The Wall Street Journal that improving air filtration and ventilation in schools using portable air purifiers and high-efficiency filters can potentially help mitigate the potential airborne transmission of the virus.
Queens Grant High School in North Carolina is taking an HVAC approach to reopening its six-building campus. To prepare for a school year that will likely bring a mix of online and in-person instruction, officials there have installed ultraviolet lights throughout the air system as a way to kill viruses.
“Day cares and hospitals and hotels have been doing this, and we have seen some articles in different publications saying UV could be effective in disinfecting viruses that are circulating through the system,” says Principal Josh Swartzlander.
The UV won’t help with face-to-face transmission but could reduce viral load in circulating air. “We are taking an ‘any means necessary’ approach, and this was one more thing that we could do,” Swartzlander says, adding that the school paid for the upgrades with operational cost savings generated by the shutdown.
READ MORE: Here’s what districts need to know about blended learning.
With Emerging Tech, Schools Can Better Adapt to Ever-Evolving Scenarios
Some districts are experimenting with more cutting-edge technologies.
This spring, New Albany-Plain Local Schools in Ohio conducted early testing on a tracing system that would track students’ locations and interactions. Others have taken up this approach as well: The Safely Reopen Schools mobile app leverages smartphones to record information about location, time, duration and participants involved in an interaction.
“If a student were to test positive, the school would likely begin their contact tracing efforts by looking at the student’s schedule to see what classes they attended,” says Nadir Ali, CEO of Inpixon, an indoor positioning and data analytics company. “Digital contact tracing can add a lot of value by objectively identifying those areas of the school in which an infected person spent a significant amount of time and targeting just those areas for deep cleaning.”
