Why Opening Windows Is a Key to Reopening Schools
By Nick Bartzokas, Mika Gröndahl, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton, Bedel Saget and Umi Syam
The C.D.C. is urging communities to reopen schools as quickly as possible, but parents and teachers have raised questions about the quality of ventilation available in public school classrooms to protect against the coronavirus.
We worked with a leading engineering firm and experts specializing in buildings systems to better understand the simple steps schools can take to reduce exposure in the classroom.
These simulations offer examples based on specific inputs, but they show how ventilation and filtration can work alongside other precautions like masking and social distancing.
“Improving ventilation is only one part,” said Mark Thaler, who is an expert in school spaces with the design firm Gensler. “It has to stand with all the other C.D.C. guidelines in order to really safely reopen.”
Step inside a classroom with augmented reality to see where contaminants spread.
This augmented reality experience puts you inside an airflow simulation. See how ventilation changes how contaminants can spread indoors.
To experience this in your space, you will need the Instagram app.
To view on Instagram, open the camera on your device and point to the QR tag below.
About this story
This simulation was created using a three-dimensional model of a New York City public school classroom, with specific inputs for the size of the room and the number of occupants and their location in the room, among other factors.
Nearly 800,000 points of data were sampled from a simulation of airflow in the room. Two values — contaminant concentration (as parts per million) and velocity (as meters per second) — were measured for each point every few seconds over 15 minutes. The animation shows a subset of this data.
The data was visualized both as streams and as horizontal cross-sections. The color range is scaled linearly from 0ppm to 5ppm.
Sources: Scott E. Frank and Gregory A. James, JB&B; Joseph G. Allen, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University; Mark Thaler, Gensler.
Parham Azimi of the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and John Wilson of Siemens EDA provided technical assistance.
Additional work by Noah Pisner and Or Fleisher.
The augmented reality effect was produced by Nicholas Bartzokas, Paula Ceballos, Lydia Jessup, Miles Peyton and Noah Pisner.