How can airborne transmission of COVID-19 indoors be minimised?
By Lidia Morawska, J. Tang, W. Bahnfleth, P. Bluyssen, A. Boerstra, G. Buonanno, Junji Cao, S. Dancer, Andreas Floto, F. Franchimon and 26 more. Environment International, 2020
1,210 citations recorded by the source corpus.
During the rapid rise in COVID-19 illnesses and deaths globally, and notwithstanding recommended precautions, questions are voiced about routes of transmission for this pandemic disease. Inhaling small airborne droplets is probable as a third route of infection, in addition to more widely recognized transmission via larger respiratory droplets and direct contact with infected people or contaminated surfaces. While uncertainties remain regarding the relative contributions of the different transmission pathways, we argue that existing evidence is sufficiently strong to warrant engineering controls targeting airborne transmission as part of an overall strategy to limit infection risk indoors. Appropriate building engineering controls include sufficient and effective ventilation, possibly enhanced by particle filtration and air disinfection, avoiding air recirculation and avoiding overcrowding. Often, such measures can be easily implemented and without much cost, but if only they are recognised as significant in contributing to infection control goals. We believe that the use of engineering controls in public buildings, including hospitals, shops, offices, schools, kindergartens, libraries, restaurants, cruise ships, elevators, conference rooms or public transport, in parallel with effective application of other controls (including isolation and quarantine, social distancing and hand hygiene), would be an additional important measure globally to reduce the likelihood of transmission and thereby protect healthcare workers, patients and the general public.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Modeling and Simulation, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80b8f6f9257fa93811bb28ccb7c100530b5cc750
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Citations in the corpus
- Decline in Mobility: Public Transport in Poland in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Confined and crowded environments, including transport hubs, that are visited by people daily can become hot-spots for spreading infectious diseases (Goscé and Johansson 2018; Browne et al. 2016; Morawska et al. 2020).”