Built Form and COVID-19

[jsburbidge]

When I started working, back in the mid-1980s, it was in a building dating from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The general arrangement was that there were offices surrounding the outside with windows, a smaller block of offices towards the inside, and a space between with a mix of carrels (junior editors, many of whom would expect to get an office someday with enough seniority) and open space with no barriers between desks (secretarial pool).

 

The building I was working in recently until the workplace was overtaken by work from home has no real offices on the floor at all, aside from some rooms in which visitors from other locations could work. There is a row of rooms against the central core of the building (surrounding the elevator block) but they are meeting rooms, kitchenettes, washrooms, printer rooms, and the like. The only people who could expect, someday, to get an office would be those who rise to the level of VP.

 

When people talk about the lack of effect of the influenza pandemic of 1918 on the built workspace, they forget that the norm was offices, larger or smaller, brighter or darker, but still, offices, for a great many more people than now occupy them. (I had an office from 1988 to 1998, more or less; now the director to whom I report has no office and the three of us who are associate directors have no offices, though sometimes larger carrels.) It was also the period when the telephone, which was being introduced, allowed a massive change in the way business was done, which swamped any effect of post-pandemic reactions.

 

A built structure to accomodate Covid-19 looks a lot like an older office building: partitions between workers, access to outside air, minimization of open spaces.

 

Once there is an effective vaccine, there will be less pressure to provide barriers and distance, but the pressure for more closed workspaces won't just go away. It will be years, even barring there being another intervening epidemic (remember, we're still waiting for the next global flu pandemic), before people once again feel at ease in full open offices.

Comments

[graydon]

Until they get the super-spread mechanics down, no one knows how much ventilation you need. The known lower bound is plausibly into "continuous sound of a train" air motion range, upward, and it won't necessarily be possible to refit into existing structures, which aren't designed with the necessary ventilation duct area, windows that open, and so on.

Plus common areas; the correct epidemiological answer is "you get your washroom". That's not going to fly in the current business climate.

So I don't expect any refitting; I do expect a lot of "return or be fired". And for this to go very badly indeed.

[jsburbidge]

There has been the minor comedy of my management trying to pretend that they are keeping to the same considered plan as they push any large-scale return off into the more remote future.

Existing structures, anything built since the 1960s, are awful from an epidemiological point of view. And not just offices: the high school I went to, built in the first third of the 20th Century or probably earlier, had windows in every classroom which could be opened; the new one up-river built in the 1960s was hermetically sealed and depended on centralised air conditioning.

What will happen is half-measures, which might work if handled carefully and in a multilayered way (limited people, higher barriers, somewhat better air filtration and circulation, masks all day, etc.). There will be a market demand for premises which are amenable to re-retrofitting (Commerce Court North and the original tower in Scotia Plaza come to mind), but not enough supply. This will happen because employers and landlords are worried about liability issues. But it will not really be enough.

[graydon]

It's possible the liability issues will hold in Canada. The US is likely to simply remove employer liability by legislative fiat.

My take is that the stacked partially effective things work against the average transmission threat surface; it's not at all clear they work if you get the bad luck to have someone who is both one of the optimal spreaders and is having their peak spreading moment. The information out of Japan, for example, really suggests that the generally effective things like masks and distance fail hard when inside if you get someone really shedding. And we do not yet know why that happens or how that works. And it wouldn't take very many much such events to make it difficult to get people into the office at all.

There's also the issue that office space is one thing; warehouse spaces, light industrial spaces, and most food processing and distribution are all big, open, echoing volumes. Re-designing those for reduced transmission risk would be difficult and really expensive. And things are already starting to get a bit wobbly; "supplier fulfilment delays" are getting longer, not shorter, the longer the pandemic continues.

[jsburbidge]

You are almost certainly right about the US, at least in jurisdictions like the "right to work" states.

In Canada (and elsewhere), it isn't just liability, it's uncertain liability. Sooner or later the courts will converge on what they consider to be an appropriate standard of care but it will probably take more time for that to happen than it will take to get a reliable vaccine, i.e. two to three years at a minimum. Until that point in time everyone who can will be scrambling to stay on the right side of the standard; for offices that will probably be "stay at home", generally.

I would be very surprised if there aren't already cases underway regarding, e.g., meat-packing plants and assembly lines. An uptick in cases and a few more instances of high-contagion industrial and food-processing environments will put real pressure on those parts of supply lines, not just because of liability but because enough people will simply quit.

Many won't because they can't afford to. The net result is what we already see: risk of contagion skews by class and income. (Which gets us back to mammonism.)

(The highest-risk jobs on the continent right now are probably support staff workers at the White House. Known exposure and no real precautions being taken.)

[graydon]

The White House is an ancient damp pile with doubtful ventilation at the best of times. Interesting to see when the great and good start obviously avoiding going there.

I'm pretty sure there's already real pressure on the food supply. UN's asserting it's the worse food security crisis in fifty years. If it gets to Canada in really noticeable ways it will already be exceptionally bad.