No government I’m aware of has yet committing to fund renovation of every indoor business in their country.

Nothing smaller than a government is prepared for the renovation cost of retrofitting every single business in the world for disease-preventing air exchange standards.

If I were a small business owner, I wouldn’t want to simultaneously scare or anger customers, especially if there’s nothing I can do to afford massive HVAC renovation to a building I probably don’t even own. I would earn the fear of patrons and the ire of other tenants, and might end up evicted by my landlord for junk reasons like epidemic fear-mongering or wasting heating and cooling on an open door.

If I were a landlord, I would have no incentive to upgrade HVAC on any building I own, because doing one would compel them all to do it, and start an arms race with my competitors that would cost my dearly without being able to raise the rent to maintain my profits, since my tenants are already underwater.

Fancy businesses with exclusively rich patrons have probably already upgraded their HVAC while we were all arguing about whether to wear masks or not, because unlike the rest of us, they aren’t constrained by the cost of remaining diligent at protecting their customers. But I bet they only improved their HVAC filtration, and added UV lights somewhere, rather than actually implementing real and serious air exchange protocols.

No bank is going to offer a landlord a low-interest HVAC upgrade loan for their building, because to do so for any one business would begin a run on the bank by every landlord and business in the world, who would demand that same loan be extended to them, while simultaneously spiking the risk of their entire portfolio of commercial property mortgages, forcing them to recapitalize or go bust.

Changing building codes will only affect new buildings, which is worthless for stopping this winter’s annual pandemic (whether it’s covid or flu or both). It’s a fine thing to do, but existing buildings will be given an exception.

Everyone’s acting in self-interest to the exclusion of others, and the only thing that’s going to be enough to break that cycle is for governments to invest GDP directly into HVAC renovation, for every single building in the world.

This isn’t a flashy solution, and there really isn’t much tech can do to help here. We simply need boots on the ground in every building in the world, and the supply chains and government funding necessary to deliver that.

But maybe we, HN readers and founders, can help. If one of you can write a tool that shows us how much renovations will truly cost, and you can reduce your estimate to a simple set of inputs^ then you have a chance to make it possible. Today we make up numbers and have no idea what it truly costs to upgrade air exchange for the cities of New York, Atherton, or Barcelona. We don’t have any idea at all. Build a tool that tells us, so that we can convince the world to prevent the next Covid.

^ For example, using these four inputs — number of rooms, number of floors, number of stairwells, number of elevators — you could offer a calculator that lets anyone punch in a building’s data from blueprints and permits, offer permalinks that store the building data, and offer to subscribe them to cost updates when the algorithm is improved.