2 meters is not enough to avoid infections indoors

Is a social distance of 2 m sufficient to avoid aerosol contamination? Not indoors, according to researchers from the Pennsylvania Department of Architectural Design who published their research in Sustainable Cities and Society magazine .

The team found that an internal distance of two meters may not be enough to adequately prevent aerosols from spreading through the air .

"We decided to investigate the air transport of viral particles emitted by infected people in buildings," said Gen Pei, head of the work. "We investigated the effects of building aeriation and physical distancing as strategies to control exposure to flying viruses ."

 


The researchers examined three factors: the amount and rate of ventilation through the space, the nature of the airflow in the room associated with different ventilation strategies, and the mode of aerosol release during respiration versus speech .

"The results of our study show that virus-infected speech particles from an infected person without a mask can quickly enter another person's breathing zone within a minute, even at a distance of two meters," explained Donghyun Rim. , co-author of the work. “This trend manifests itself in rooms without adequate ventilation. The results indicate that physical distance alone is not sufficient to prevent human exposure to exhaled aerosols and should be used with other control strategies such as camouflage and adequate ventilation ”.

That is, aerosols spread much further and faster in rooms where fresh air is constantly flowing and pushing old air into a ventilation shaft near the ceiling, that is, in a system installed in most residential buildings, whose concentration can be seven times greater than that of a mixed one. -Mode ventilation systems, according to the results of the investigation.

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