We don’t trifle with air quality in Japan. CO concentration readings2 are displayed there live in company meeting rooms, in stores and even in entertainment venues. The very simple and strictly objective principle establishes that too high a concentration of CO2 in an enclosed space indicates poor air circulation and therefore an increased risk of spreading COVID-19.
Cinemas and performance halls, like their websites, have been equipped since 2020 with means of disseminating readings in real time. The acceptable threshold is below 1000 parts per million (ppm). Outdoors, the average is around 400 ppm. An experimental concert conducted in September 2020 in Tokyo sent the data into a panic, which reached highs of 10,000 ppm.
These are good examples of the use of new technologies in the response to the pandemic crisis. In comparison, in Quebec, it took months and months of criticism, controversy and negotiation for measures to test and improve air quality in schools to be set in motion. Ontario, meanwhile, purchased more than 50,000 high-efficiency particulate air filtration units last year.
“We continue to impose drastic measures on the unvaccinated, even though the pandemic is not their fault and besides, we are not doing much super smart to stem the pandemic in general”, affirms the Professor Damien Contandriopoulos, health systems specialist at Victoria University, who himself cites the case of CO controls2 in Japan.
“Measures that would benefit the whole population, such as the adoption of much stricter standards on the ventilation of public places, hospitals, schools, shopping centers, would be more useful. Over the next ten years, that’s probably where we’re going, on regulations requiring, for example, the monitoring of carbon monoxide levels during indoor gatherings. »
The new normal will therefore impose reforms of “living structures”, as the professor from British Columbia still says, new standards for offices, schools and hospitals (most of which are still very old in Quebec), but also residences, sports facilities and public transport. There are also CO detectors2 laptops priced around $400 that can be used by anyone, anywhere, in Japan, here, in Australia.
“With the new variant, the centrality of the vaccine intervention against the pandemic has just taken a nasty slap, adds Mr. Contandriopoulos. This situation suggests that the vaccine approach is not the way out of the pandemic for the future, unless there is exceptional progress in this technology. Moreover, when the coronavirus was identified, veterinarians warned that they themselves had been looking for decades for vaccines to protect pigs, but without success. »
Science and disabilities
The health response has gone through a panoply of technical means. Rapid infection detection tests and contact tracing apps appear to be poorly used or underused. Other technologies, on the other hand, have borne fruit, such as the vaccine passport, now required as a universal sesame.
Can we then speak of a kind of limited technophobia? Does our hypermodern society employ certain tools of the digital age while continuing to submit to very old prophylactic means such as the curfew?
The professor of physics at the University of Montreal Normand Mousseau replies that, on the contrary, our society has sinned by monomaniacal technophilia by betting everything on the rapid development and the massive use of the vaccine, an undeniably formidable technoscientific breakthrough.
“For me, the lesson is that a crisis like this cannot be resolved by miracle solutions,” says Normand Mousseau. We thought the problems would magically stop the day we got the vaccine. Many countries are playing the same game. We relied on this technology alone to avoid making a real strategy. »
Normand Mousseau signed the essay Pandemic, when reason falls ill (Boréal), which focuses on management failures in the first year of the crisis. “The essence of my message in my book is that we have managed the pandemic on a small scale since the beginning and, unfortunately, that is what we continue to do now. Not everywhere, but in Quebec, among others. We were also very little inspired by places that did it properly, like Sweden, for example, which has an excess morbidity rate similar to ours, but which let people live normally much more. We were mainly inspired by those who did it all wrong. We still see it with confinement. »
Tactics and strategy
Communications professor Stéphane Couture, also from the University of Montreal, distinguishes between tactics and strategy in government action. “Even the media fall into the trap by constantly asking what we are doing there, there, there, immediately rather than asking how we are preparing for in six months or a year, says the specialist in digital technologies. In fact, the government takes tactical positions that defend themselves. It is the longer-term view that is inadequate. What are we going to do now to prepare for the next variant? »
He gives the example of a so-called smart mask, effective like the N95 and reusable, seen in a large area of Montreal. “Are we going to have disposable masks for another decade? The environmental problem is the same with rapid plastic tests: you have to think of other solutions. »
That said, he also does not want to fall into “solutionism”, this belief in the omnipotence of technology to solve all medical or environmental problems. Artificial intelligence has certainly helped in the fight against health, without however becoming the hoped-for miracle tool. In addition, certain technologies pose ethical problems in relation to population monitoring and the use of data.
“There would still be a way to do more and better,” says Mr. Couture. He quotes computer scientist Paul Dourish, a specialist in society-machine interaction, for whom the pandemic has above all proven the fabulous capacity for technological adaptation of our societies, which have switched to teleworking and distance learning almost instantaneously.
“In one week, at the University of Montreal, we transferred 1,800 courses online. It shows how ready we were. Barely ten years ago, we would never have arrived there. In contrast, at the start of the pandemic, contact tracing data was sent by fax. It does not make sense. At the time of the balance sheets, we will have to ask ourselves, in interdisciplinary consultation, how digital technology could be better used. »