Abstract
Recent studies argue that inhalation of respiratory droplets in indoor environments is one of the significant routes of COVID-19 infection. In many cases, patients are isolated in hospitals and quarantine centers to minimize the spread. However, the rooms allocated to these patients are accessed by health care and sanitization workers a couple of times in a day. Since the expiratory activities release airborne droplets with certain viral load, there is a greater need to study the survival of these droplets in the room of a patient to control the exposure to the accessing people. A bi-compartment and bi-component numerical model is developed to study the survival of these droplets in a room, taking into consideration the deposition rates of the droplets and the ventilation rates in the room. The vital aspects related to the survival of the droplets, such as the effect of the severity of the infection, types of releases, size-dependent deposition and role of ventilation are discussed. © 2021, AAGR Aerosol and Air Quality Research. All rights reserved.
Highlights
Publisher: Taiwan Association for Aerosol Research ISSN: 1680-8584 print ISSN: 2071-1409 onlineCopyright: The Author(s)
The simulation results of the virusol droplets from expiratory releases are discussed
The results show that the maximum concentration in Far Field (FF) (~5 # m–3) is very low compared to that of Near Field (NF) (~6 × 104 # m–3), i.e., most of the released virusol droplets are contained in the NF, due to very low ventilation
Summary
Publisher: Taiwan Association for Aerosol Research ISSN: 1680-8584 print ISSN: 2071-1409 online. It has been documented that transmission of the disease from one person to another can happen through infectious airborne droplets released from the affected person (Morawska and Cao, 2020). Transmission through expiratory droplets in an indoor environment has been touted as a significant source for Aerosol and Air Quality Research | https://aaqr.org. Since the affected patients are isolated and kept in special rooms of hospitals and quarantine centers, studying the number concentration of infectious droplets in those facilities is very important to avoid unwanted exposure to the other people. We are presenting a comprehensive investigation on the evolution of the droplet size distribution and its concentration from expiratory activities in a ventilated room, by using a bi-component, bi-compartment indoor air model, taking into account the effects of coagulation, deposition and the ventilation rates.
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