Article contributed by Mike Berman, COO, Day & Nite/All Service
Last Monday morning, basketball player Greg Monroe signed a 10 day Minnesota Timberwolves contract and that evening he scored 11 points and grabbed 9 rebounds in his first NBA action since 2019. Normally this wouldn’t be newsworthy beyond the Monroe family and his closest friends, but when Monroe entered this late December game he set a new NBA record becoming the 541st player to see regular season game action.
Considering no NBA team has yet played half its 82 game regular season schedule, against the backdrop of rising rates of positive Covid cases and the anticipated post-holiday season surge, knowing there are more people lining up to take NBA jobs than in other fields, and the league’s Covid management leadership dating back to suspending the 2020 season on March 11th that year, it’s news everyone should pay undivided attention to.
Already hurting from Covid fatigue, with some experts projecting 500,000 or more new positive Covid cases per day post-holidays, one might logically argue we are all living Graham Greene’s “a story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Every New Year is the time to look ahead; on this first 2022 Monday we will choose that moment to do so with emphasis on several quantifiable looking back experiences:
- Infections are on the rise
- Produced in record time, vaccinations have proven to be highly effective, and
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the unvaccinated are 14 times more likely to die from covid infection.
Coronavirus, the Covid pandemic in all its variants and mutations, is transmitted through the air. Many believe Covid-19 and all it spawned is just a more recent and deadly public health threat following in the footsteps of at least MERS, Ebola, SARS, swine and bird flu (among others). Undoubtedly, Greg Monroe found his way back to the NBA because tight quarter exposure in locker rooms, team huddles, on-the-court action is perfectly suited for the virus’ airborne transmission. Basketball courts, hockey rinks and football fields are hardly the only tight quarter spaces people occupy. Consider Dr Sanjay Gupta’s recently released 5 Places You’ll Most Likely Catch Covid, isolating highly trafficked indoor venues where 4 of the 5—hotels, bars, cafes and restaurants—are hospitality industry segments. Significantly, despite passengers being crammed into terminals and on flights, passenger airlines do not make Dr. Gupta’s list.
While mandatory mask wearing may get most if not all of the traveling public’s attention, in fact airlines swift and significant attention to indoor environmental quality was confirmed by the International Air Transport Association’s late December 2021 report that airplane cabins pose low coronavirus infection risk. At this point it’s relatively safe to say (a) rather than looking for a silver bullet Covid fix a layered approach is in order, and (b) failure to deploy smart, proven technologies to purify indoor air as part of the integrated strategy is a major mistake. Dangerous pathogens including but not limited to Covid-19 and all its variants will remain in our midst, perhaps becoming more deadly, to the extent businesses do not prioritize indoor environmental quality.
If nothing else, the Covid trilogy permanently explodes a tragic myth: something we can’t see most certainly can hurt us, something we cannot see—specifically the air we breathe—can and has killed far too many! Bipolar air ionization has proven to be a highly effective, cost-efficient air purification means for cleansing the air we breathe, an essential layer of protection, precaution and prevention against all the invisible harmful airborne particles causing so much destruction and death. Given all we have suffered through, given all we have learned about viral transmission, there’s no logical explanation for any business to not explore bipolar air ionization as a primary way to get better control over conditions that continue to swirl out of control.
More than wishing one another a happy new year, let’s do the right things to make 2022 that year we have been waiting for far too long. Day & Nite Performance Solutions comprehensive suite of highly engineered, integrated indoor environmental quality technologies and services provide essential layers of protection, precaution and prevention against all those invisibly harmful things that need no longer harm us. Email jbf@wearetheone.com to learn more about how to cost-efficiently lower public health and business risks.
