Caution To The Wind

Desperate to reopen and loaded with stimulus cash, schools are spending millions on high-tech air purifiers. But are they safe?

- By Madison Pauly. Photoillustrations by Darren Braun

Brandon Armbruster just wanted to keep his students safe. The chief operating officer of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, Armbruster spent the spring and summer of 2020 diligently preparing for students to return—designing outdoor classrooms, setting up testing routines, and debating whether to cancel sports. A private school with nearly 1,000 K–12 students on two campuses, St. Andrew’s had its own advisory committee of doctors and scientists to guide decisions about covid. And as they learned more about how the coronavirus could hang suspended in aerosols for hours, the committee urged Armbruster to turn his attention to ventilation and ways to maximize the amount of fresh air St. Andrew’s could pump into its classrooms.

So when a contractor the school had worked with before suggested installing high-tech devices in air ducts to scrub out the coronavirus, Armbruster was intrigued. The devices used a technique called bipolar ionization, shooting tiny, electrically charged ions into the air, where they would interact with and neutralize airborne contaminants like viruses. Or, at least, that’s the theory. According to the manufacturer, Plasma Air, the Spanish Ministry of Defense had backed research that proved its purifier could reduce 99 percent of a coronavirus surrogate from the air in a Madrid hotel room within 10 minutes. All St. Andrew’s would need to do was attach Plasma Air’s small cartridges into its air ducts, hook them up to some electricity, and let the ionization process begin.