Always gave me a chuckle those earnest beavers like “WHY haven’t we had a program to completely overhaul the ventilation system of every school and public building yet?”

Cause like, contracting was one of the major things my dad oversaw as counsel for the school district and like,

• figuring what you need in the roughest sense
• putting up a bond issue to fund it
• assembling a coalition to support the bond issue
• putting out a request for bids
• tendering bids
• awarding a contract
• working through all the administrative law challenges by contractors that didn’t win
• getting it done whenever the construction labor market is weak and cheap enough for all the subcontractors to hire

to make partial upgrades to like a fifth of your schools over three years, which have modern ventilation systems to start with, is like a 6 year process, and that’s assuming the bond issue passes on the first try

The only parallel I can think of was hospitals upgrading their systems to eliminate the standing water Legionnaires came from; there are far fewer hospitals than schools in America, the work was fairly confined, and that took a while