Abstract
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, buildings have been viewed as a facilitator of disease spread, where the three main transmission routes (contact, droplets, aerosols) are more likely to happen. However, with proper policies and measures, buildings can be better prepared for re-occupancy and beyond. This study reviews the strategies developed by several Sustainability Rating Systems (SRS, namely WELL, Fitwel and LEED) to respond to any infectious disease and ensure that building occupants protect and maintain their health. The best practices, that are similar between each SRS, highlight that the overall sustainability of the spaces increases if they are resilient. Results indicate that SRS promote a weak sustainability approach since they accept that economic development can reduce natural capitals. SRS are also characterized by an aggregated level of assessment of different criteria that does not allow to map different choices. However, the decomposition of the concept of sustainability in its three bottom lines (i.e., environmental, social and economic) shows that preventive strategies are likely to be systematically adopted as the state-of-the-art. Finally, even if the latest research points out the airborne transmission as the major infection route, the SRS lack analytical measures to address issues such as social distancing.
Highlights
The focus is on WELL, Fitwel and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), that have been the only ones to officially publish ad-hoc strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that are critically compared at the end
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, buildings have been viewed as a facilitator of disease spread, where the three main transmission routes are more likely to happen
Their level of sustainability increases and their features are expected to become part of the state-of-the-art in the future, such as the strategies adopted in modern buildings that were originally introduced in response to infectious diseases of the past
Summary
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a family of positive-sense single-stranded RNA respiratory viruses, meaning that they have ribonucleic acid as genetic material [1]. Their name comes from the crown-shaped tips present on their surface, and they cause several human diseases, from influenza to Ebola [2]. At the end of 2019, a new type of disease (later named as coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19) broke out in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in China [3,4,5] Doctors discovered that it was caused by a new strain of the coronavirus family, SARS-CoV-2 [6,7]
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