[steviedotboston]

I don't think the clear water and clear air analogy works very well. They seem to be very different cases. Keeping clean and dirty water separate is trivial and requires no more advanced technology than plumbing. Keeping clean and "dirty" air separate is impossible. We will always breathe air that includes pathogens. That isn't to say there should be efforts to improve air quality, but I think a lot of times analogies like this oversimplify things. It's easy to eradicate cholera through cleanliness and modern plumbing, but we will never eradicate airborne viruses through air filters and masks.

[JBorrow]

"Cleanliness and modern plumbing" include massive water treatment facilities, digging up every street, laying billions of miles of pipe.

[steviedotboston]

The main effort is separating drinking water and waste water. Keeping them as far away as possible and preventing contamination. There is no way to do that with air. The air we breath in and the air we breath out will always mix. The best we can hope for is some amount of dilution with fresh air/filters, bit at the end of the you are never going to be able to achieve the same thing with airborne viruses that we did with waterborne illnesses. The flu, covid, etc are with us for the long haul.

[gridspy]

It's a good analogy. Invest in infrastructure to extract dirty air and deliver clean air into living spaces. Provide suitable standards and technologies to do so.

It would be cheaper than the infrastructure to extract dirty water and deliver clean (treated) water because we don't need to transport the air anywhere near as far and air treatment is simpler.