COVID-19 Pandemic
John Macomber: Employees and buildings will be healthier
COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) will change the nature of our offices, apartments, hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Concern about the spread of this and other communicable diseases might fade after this contagion, but there will probably be more outbreaks in the decades to come. This means that we can expect our physical structures to change, too.Think of the extension of today’s airport and courthouse security screening: not just what weapons you may be carrying, but also what infections you may be carrying. Many of us have experienced health screening in Asian airports for years as technicians viewed our facial temperatures, checked our passports and vaccination histories, and asked questions. This will become a more permanent component of entry to office buildings, schools, and transit hubs.
Physical components of buildings and public spaces will change, too—in subtle ways. We are the indoor generation; we spend 90 percent of our time inside. (This means that by the time you are 60 years old, you will have spent 54 years indoors). Organizations will realize that indoor air quality—notably involving fresh air and filtration—directly impacts productivity of healthy people and helps mitigate the onset of sick people.
As Dr. Joseph Allen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and I argue in our forthcoming book, Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, more money will be spent and should be spent on fans, filters, ductwork, chillers, heat exchangers, and dehumidifiers—and on the energy to run them.
The next wave of intervention will be in the collection of population information regarding who enters the building and when. With facial recognition and infrared cameras, there can be time series data collected from your temperature and probably what was in the breaths you exhaled, captured over weeks and years, as you enter vestibules and ride elevators.Further, apartment dwellers, office workers, and hospital patients alike will be able to track and share air quality analytics in a very democratized way from their handheld sensors connected to their mobile phones and organized and served up by third-party rating databases like the future Morningstars, Yelps, Glassdoors, TripAdvisors, and others.
Building owners (and their investors and lenders) in all sectors will have to both outfit their buildings to measure components of public health and also respond to their occupants doing their own assessments. This might be disconcerting, and the rollout will be uneven, but we all will be collectively safer.
John Macomber (@cleantechcities) is a senior lecturer of business administration in the Finance Unit
Source: This article first published Working Knowledge by Harvard Business School
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