Systematically omitting indoor air quality: sub-standard guidance for shelters, group homes and long-term care in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public Health Ontario (PHO) is mandated by legislation to share scientific advice during infectious disease outbreaks and help reduce health inequities in Ontario, Canada. PHO was founded in part to address the failures of Ontario’s public health system during the 2003 outbreak of SARS-CoV-1, which included the failure to address airborne transmission. By January 2021, public health authorities had access to a body of literature suggesting SARS-CoV-2 was airborne, and had received urgent warnings from scientists. We set out to document how PHO responded to the likelihood – and, eventually, the certainty – of airborne transmission in the context of its guidance for congregate settings such as long-term care and shelters. In October 2021, we reviewed PHO’s public, written COVID-19 guidance for these settings, with a focus on indoor air quality (IAQ) measures that mitigate airborne transmission, such as ventilation. We identified 11 PHO documents for congregate settings. They contained no references to IAQ measures. We did, however, find references to IAQ measures in parallel documents for schools, summer camps, and clinical offices. Our findings demonstrate PHO omitted key infection prevention measures from its COVID-19 guidance for congregate settings, putting workers and residents at greater risk of exposure, illness and death, and exacerbating health inequities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".