Mea culpa: open the windows on the experts

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Is there some other way of calculating a 50-fold increase in ventilation rates? (Getty)

We ran a “home news in brief” item earlier this week that I found impossible to understand. It was headlined, “Room ventilation must improve to beat Omicron, say experts,” which was a bad start. It ought to be a rule not to use the word “expert” in a headline, because it tells the reader nothing about the sort of expertise that is claimed by whichever authority is being quoted.

Worse, the news story, which was only a paragraph long, gave us no further details, except to say that “researchers” had studied “the minimum dose of virus particles necessary to cause an infection for each variant”.

Nor were the findings of this study reported in a useful way. We said: “Experts have warned that room ventilation rates need to be some 50 times higher to prevent the spread of Omicron.” Does that just mean the windows should be left open, or is there some other way of calculating a 50-fold increase in ventilation rates?