Israel Selects Aura Air To Counter COVID-19 In Jerusalem Schools

Israel’s Aura Air, the startup with an AI tech solution to purify and manage indoor air quality, announced last week that it has been selected by the country’s health and education ministries to conduct a new pilot to install the company’s air filtration systems in 700 classrooms across Jerusalem and eventually stop the spread of the SARS – CoV-2 virus in order to keep public indoor spaces safe.

As part of the pilot, initiated by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Aura Air systems will be installed at approximately 100 educational institutions in the Jerusalem area. Over 150 educational institutions across the world have already partnered with Aura Air to protect the air in their classrooms.

The implementation of Aura Air’s smart air purification systems in classrooms “are helping reduce infection rates, and keeping children safe and healthy,” the company said in a statement. “

The company said its assembly facility in Israel will help the company stock schools in a short period of time.

“Using Aura Air’s innovative purification system to protect Israel’s schoolchildren from COVID-19 is a matter of national urgency,” said Aviad Shnaiderman, co-founder & CEO of Aura Air. “We have been leading the charge for clean and safe air globally and are honored to now be selected for this pilot as the fight against COVID-19 continues.”

“What COVID-19 did for our company is fast forward the awareness of the importance of indoor environments,” Shnaiderman told NoCamels in January.  “You can see the haze and you can see the smog, so, people know about outdoor air quality. But no one was really paying enough attention to the indoor environment.”

In August 2019, Aura Air conducted an experiment at the general and oncological surgery department of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel in order to rate Aura Air’s abilities to clean and purify the air from the novel coronavirus (IBV). The initial results were ground-breaking as 99.9 percent of the virus was targeted and purified, according to a statement.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the study’s focus shifted toward the prevention of hospital-acquired infections. The company’s trial results in October by Innovative Bioanalysis Laboratory in California demonstrated that Aura’s smart air purification system effectively destroys 99.99 percent of airborne SARS-CoV-2, including Delta variant particles, within 60 minutes.