Your advice for air filters is good general advice, IMO. I have a 700 sqft apartment with:
1x Honeywell HPA300 (rated for 465 sqft)
6x Coway AP-1512HH (each rated for 361 sqft)
1x Honeywell HPA100 (rated for 155 sqft)
I also have a Honeywell FPR 10 filter on the HVAC air return. So, over 2800 sqft of CADR-rated filtering for a 700 sqft apartment. Activated carbon pre-filters are changed every 2 weeks and the HEPA filter is changed once a month. We spend about $400/mo on filters, on top of $1,100/month rent.
Unfortunately, HEPA filtration does little for the type of air contamination that we're dealing with. Ethylene oxide is more like a "VOC" than a "PM2.5". The activated carbon filters help a bit, but are "used up" very quickly (1-2 days IME). The HEPA filters do very little/nothing for VOC contamination as far as we can tell.
Indeed, it is time to move away. I am in one of the most heavily-affected featured areas in this article[0]. However, my wife and I work in the chemicals industry, so we have personal experience identifying most of the compounds by smell and have unusual awareness of their effects vs. most of the nearby citizens.
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air
Really terrible to hear this. You aren't fucking around with this, but it's still not enough. $400 a month on filters is insane.
Thanks for that article. Very eye-opening.
I hope you get out of there soon, but I can't imagine the guilt you feel for the citizens left behind. Horrible.
Basically, you're making a cube. One side is the box fan, with the intake coming from the inside of the cube. The other sides are taped together filters. It significantly reduces the strain on the motor of the fan, and you can use the cube for a long time before replacing the filters, since each one is filtering so much less air.
Please be very careful with this. This significantly strains the motor of your average cheap box fan, and hot motors tend to die faster and can get hot enough to melt plastic and start fires.
I'd really recommend an actual air purifier instead, especially if it will run while you're asleep or not at home.
You need to exercise. You are in your mid-thirties now. It's a big problem if you don't. But you have bad air quality where you live. I've dealt with this myself in the past.
A relatively inexpensive solution that I recommend for anyone in areas with poor air quality is to build your own filter fans. Get a standard box fan, get a furnace filter that has HEPA ratings, duct tape the furnace filter to the back of the fan. One of these in a whole house does a good job. Put three of them in there and it's crazy how big of a difference it makes. My wife has respiratory issues and my son has asthma. My wife had to be hospitalized twice for wildfire smoke in my neighborhood. Once I started doing the filter fan trick the issues went away. You can then work out in your home. Used cardio equipment is ridiculously easy to come by. I purchased a reflex punching bag for my basement a few months ago and it's the best piece of cardio equipment I've ever gotten. Doesn't take up too much space wasn't too expensive either.
I applaud you on your diet though. You definitely have a good grasp of the metrics that matter. Low triglycerides and high HDL are crucial, and good for you keeping that blood pressure solid. That diet is clearly doing good things for you.
Just keep in mind that exercise does great things for mental health by relieving stress via hormones.
One side note:
You may have contracted covid and never known it. The only reason I knew I caught it back in February of 2021 was because of my complete loss of sense of smell. If not for that single symptom I would have never known I had it. It didn't impact me in any other way. My wife and kids caught it as well and had absolutely no symptoms. They only knew they caught it because they got tested along with me.