Beyond HEPA filters, which remain the industry standard, you can buy plasma generators, electrostatic precipitators, germicidal irradiators, needle-point bipolar ionizers, activated-carbon filters, dry-hydrogen-peroxide systems, ultraviolet lights, and a Kickstarter product made of “13 carefully selected plants known for their ability to purify the air” (never mind that experts estimate an 800-square-foot apartment would need more than a thousand plants to make any meaningful difference in air quality). Many manufacturers crow about their patented technologies, backed by studies of sometimes dubious quality. There are now purifiers for your home, your office, and your car as well as ones you can carry like a clutch or wear as a necklace. Last fall, as cases continued to rise and Americans contemplated a long winter indoors, the three most popular items on Wirecutter, the product-reviewing arm of the Times, were all air purifiers.Ĭonsumers turned to Wirecutter with good reason: The purifier industry has been a swamp of misinformation and specious claims since long before there was a pandemic fortune to be made. Texas bought a thousand purifiers for its state capitol, and New York City’s public schools bought 30,000 - not enough to satisfy one group of teachers, who crowdfunded $159,000 to buy more. Coway, a leading manufacturer, sold more purifiers in a single month, last August, than it did in all of 2017. The pandemic sent the business into hyperdrive.
To help manage our apartment’s COVID outbreak, we were running a pair of air purifiers purchased from a salesman who promised they could “kill COVID.” Purifier sales were booming even before the pandemic, riding the wave of airborne misfortune spread by climate change and California’s wildfires.
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A book called Breath, about how to breathe better, was released two months into the pandemic and has been on and off the New York Times best-seller list ever since. We buy face masks in bulk and think twice about inhaling if we pass a coughing stranger on the sidewalk. Now, each breath comes with a possibility that the cocktail may be spiked with SARS-CoV-2. Breathing a year ago was a mindless act we performed 20,000 times a day, taking in a gaseous cocktail that’s four parts nitrogen and one part oxygen. With each cough and sneeze, it felt like only a matter of time before the droplets would come for me.įew things have shifted more in the pandemic than our relationship to the air around us.
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I hunkered down in the middle, delivering food while wearing a pair of masks, opening the windows every now and then even though it was freezing, and trying to fall asleep on a pullout couch while keeping a nervous eye on the air-conditioning vents. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, and the patients quarantined themselves into bedrooms at opposite ends. He felt okay, for now, but she was miserable. At the end of January, I found myself living through an acute bout of a very modern panic: fear of the air around me. Both my girlfriend and my dad, with whom we were living, had just tested positive for COVID.
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