2023-08-31 20:13:58
“Covid resurfaces”, headline the newspapers, in a context of burial of tests and any epidemiological surveillance device. As in 2022, we are indeed witnessing a summer surge of this virus stubbornly refusing to buy into the “winter virus” narrative.
A virus that has never stopped circulating, mutating, killing or invalidating part of the population: more than 6,000 people are said to have died from it in the first half of 2023; and Public Health France estimates that around 2 million the number of French people over the age of 18 have long Covid. A virus that spreads very easily in the air of insufficiently ventilated premises, such as those in schools.
Contrary to the promise made by Emmanuel Macron in April 2022 to launch “immediately a massive air purification effort in our schools” and in all public buildings, nothing has been done to reduce the concentration of infectious aerosols in closed places. So, at the start of the new school year, the vast majority of French children will find the stale air of crowded classrooms, favorable to the spread of pathogens harmful to health, but also to schooling, the organization of families and that of society in as a whole – since they will lead to absences of students and teachers, a drop in academic performance, childcare problems, a lack of staff, the contamination of parents, absent in turn…
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When the new Minister of National Education and Youth, Gabriel Attal, claims to have the objective of doubling the number of thermal renovations of schools financed by the State, did he include in these projects the improvement of indoor air quality? Reconciling thermal efficiency and air quality is not only possible from a technological point of view, it is also a major public health issue and a legal obligation.
“One of the great lessons of the pandemic”
Renovation work aimed at reducing the energy consumption of buildings must take into account regulatory constraints, in particular the 800 ppm threshold [partie par million, une unité de mesure de concentration d’une substance dans l’environnement] of CO₂ and the new system for monitoring indoor air quality, set out in the decrees of December 2022. There is also an emergency for schools that are not subject to thermal renovation: in too of schools – the majority –, the indoor air quality is poor, as Public Health France reminded us again in March.
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