First, I’m not questioning the recommendation to stay indoors, or that poor air quality is bad for your health.
I don’t understand how staying inside is better, especially in homes (like mine) that don’t have central ventilation or air filters. My home isn’t air-tight, and I can’t recycle the air I’m breathing out – so there must be new air coming in from outside.
Can anyone explain *why* it’s safer to stay indoors? How is the air inside safer to breathe?
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Buildings are usually well isolated and you breathe the inside air. That’s why you need to open the windows occasionally. But in fact you can breathe inside air longer than in the movies.
This isolation is also why there can be cold outside and warm inside: the cold outside air cannot exchange with the warm inside air.
If you have AC, it may take air from outside but filters it.
So the idea with staying inside is basically that you breathe the reserve of inside air that’s trapped in the building, until the bad outside air goes away, and only then you open the windows and get fresh air. Obviously it works only if the bad air goes away faster than you need to vent.
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