BlockDox Monitors your School’s Indoor Air quality and Detects Conditions where Viruses and Pollutants thrive
Create the optimal virus-free learning environment in your school
Every parent wants their child to learn in a healthy and safe environment. This desire has only exacerbated because of COVID-19, with teachers and school staff also concerned about a healthy workplace. With COVID-19 restrictions being lifted in the UK and internationally, attention is inevitably shifting towards “living with COVID-19” despite the rampant spread of new variants. For schools, this means minimising any disruption for staff and students. One of the key ways to achieve this is by monitoring and maintaining a healthy indoor learning environment.
Poor indoor air quality helps viruses, such as COVID-19 and influenza, and other illnesses to spread. Even mild increases in temperature and humidity can create the ideal conditions for viruses and bacteria to propagate and spread. Recent research has also shown that an increase of just one microgram in PM2.5 can increase the death rate amongst COVID-19 patients by 15%.
Taking care of your indoor air quality not only reduces adverse health risks, and the chances pupils and staff will be absent due to illness but it can also improve learning conditions and reassure staff, visitors, students and their parents that the school is healthy. Ignoring the potential repercussions from poor air quality just puts staff and students at a disadvantage.
BlockDox has particular experience in helping organisations monitor and maintain healthy air quality and our innovations were recently recognised as winners of the Mayor of London’s Air Quality Challenge.
Students and teachers spend an average of 714 hours at school each year. This means that they both spend a considerable amount of time breathing the school’s indoor air. When this air is of poor quality and polluted, it ultimately impairs students and teachers’ performance, concentration and overall health. Additionally, the damages poor air quality can have on our health are considerable: from carrying diseases (e.g COVID-19) to containing high levels of PM2.5 and other pollutants, the air we breathe can seriously aggravate our health. Being more vulnerable, schoolchildren are particularly affected by poor air and pollution.
A recent Guardian article has unveiled shocking figures: 3.4 million UK students frequent schools where the air quality is below WHO limits. This is mostly due to crowded and poorly ventilated classrooms. Car traffic near UK schools makes matters worse, leading to high levels of air pollution that easily finds its way inside schools’ premises. And this is not without consequences; multiple studies have pointed to the dire effects this can cause such as exacerbating asthma symptoms in younger children, affecting lung growth, causing cancer, strokes and serious cognitive impairments (Mayor of London, 2019). Poor air quality has also been linked to a rise of COVID-19 transmissions. Since the risk of airborne infections is 19 times higher indoors, especially in school settings, creating optimal learning conditions should be of utmost importance for all.
Improving indoor air quality can also positively impact the learning environment. C02 levels can quickly rise in a packed classroom, but this can also affect concentration levels, cognitive function and impair decision making. Therefore, taking care of classroom air quality is a simple and effective measure to provide pupils with an unfair competitive advantage in their studies.
This year, due to continuous lockdowns, most UK children have already missed out on a lot of what school offers in terms of assistance and experience. Students have had to learn on zoom and, as a result, have started to lag behind because of a lack of individual attention which has led to a significant drop in grades for some. If individual students or even classes or year groups have to isolate due to COVID-19 illness then this also puts an additional burden on their parents. Instead of being able to work, parents need to supervise their children who would otherwise be at school. The knock-on effect from instances of isolation is therefore profound, with consequences way beyond the school itself and into the wider community and the economy as a whole.
BlockDox helps you to improve your air and detects viruses, VOC and PM2.5 so productivity and overall health are improved.
With us you can effectively address the immediate concerns that poor air quality and COVID-19 have brought to your school. Together we can take steps to reduce the risk of transmission as you welcome staff and students back to school.
