Air circulation and ventilation is key to preventing a build-up of droplets and aerosols that spread COVID-19, researchers say.
Most COVID guidelines have stressed the 6-foot physical distancing rule, with the idea being that the virus spreads through large droplets produced when we talk, cough, or sneeze. Relatively heavy, these droplets tend to fall to the ground before they travel more than a few feet.
“However we are having these outbreaks even when people are keeping this 6-foot distance, and especially indoors,” says Bjorn Birnir, the director of the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. More recent evidence suggests that the virus also travels in smaller droplets and aerosols, which can linger in the air for hours.
Birnir and his colleague Luiza Angheluta—a professor at the University of Oslo and currently a visiting researcher at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics—decided to apply their expertise in fluid dynamics to COVID super-spreading events to understand how they might have happened. The crucial factor, they found, was air circulation.
Their results appear on medRxiv, the preprint server for health sciences, and are currently undergoing peer review.
In late January and early February, 10 individuals from three families all fell ill after eating at the same air-conditioned restaurant in Guangzhou, China on Chinese New Year. The cases all were linked to a single contagious customer at the restaurant.
All the diners who came down with the infection sat in one section of the restaurant, which was served by a single air conditioning ..
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