If you don't sweat / get dehydrated, the fanned hot air is just a blast furnace and instead of feeling relief you can tell it's making things worse.
But if I were elderly and that somehow affected my ability to perspire correctly even if hydrated, I'd just use a misting bottle to spray myself or repeatedly enter a cold shower.
It's obviously more effective in lower humidity ambient conditions, but the body must have moisture at the surface to carry the heat away evaporating in the wind.
Then I got out to the desert southwest, and behold! Sweat evaporated. Temperatures that were literally deadly back home were now quite tolerable.
Fan Death is still not a thing, because that supposedly kills perfectly healthy young people in not-especially-hot environments. It's the fan itself that's somehow deadly.
But yeah, once the air gets above body temperature, air (even moving air) isn't going to cool you off. And even somewhat below body temperature, you can get hotter because you're generating heat faster than even moving air can remove it.
bikenaga•6mo ago