This is an account that should be heard of an important struggle: the struggle of a large group of experts who came together at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to warn the world about the risk of airborne transmission and the consequences of ignoring it. We alerted the World Health Organization about the potential significance of the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and the urgent need to control it, but our concerns were dismissed. Here we describe how this happened and the consequences. We hope that by reporting this story we can raise awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the need to be open to new evidence, and to prevent it from happening again. Acknowledgement of an issue, and the emergence of new evidence related to it, is the first necessary step towards finding effective mitigation solutions.

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The OFFICAIR project aimed to describe comfort and indoor air quality in new and retrofitted office buildings in Europe. This article reports the perceived comfort and health, as well as their relations with building characteristics, in the 21 participating office buildings in France. Occupant perception and personal information were collected through an online questionnaire. In parallel, a building audit was performed to describe each building. The survey took place between January and April 2012 over two weeks in each building. Among the 1,190 respondents, 54% were dissatisfied with the noise from the other occupants, 48% with dry air, and 46% with stuffy air. The most common health symptoms attributed to the building were headaches (31% of the respondents), dry eyes (27%), irritated eyes (21%) and a dry or sore throat (21%). No difference was observed between the French buildings and the European sample (167 buildings, 7,441 respondents). The perceived indoor environment and related health symptoms seemed similar to those reported in past studies. The multilevel linear regressions highlight the major influence of the individual parameters on both indoor air quality and comfort perception, as well as on PSI-5 (number of building-related symptoms across five symptoms defining the sick building syndrome). Occupants who could control their indoor environment had better perceptions. Similarly, an efficient procedure for managing building-related complaints was associated with better perceptions of indoor air quality and comfort and with fewer building-related health effects.@en