For more than 25 years, Tom Smith has run 3Flow, a company whose sole mission is to make sure people don’t get sick from airborne hazards in their workplaces.
He suddenly has the attention of a lot of employers who never really gave thought to it before the pandemic.
Typically, Smith’s team focuses on how the air moves through places like labs or factories, but since the pandemic started, his business has been getting calls about open layout offices, conference rooms and auditoriums.
“A lot of people have found out that their systems are dysfunctional,” Smith said.
Office spaces are often a lot harder to work with than labs, Smith said, because they weren’t designed with floating pathogens in mind, and the systems have not been well maintained. He says there’s a simple reason for that: it wasn’t required.
