Fluid dynamics of COVID-19 airborne infection suggests urgent data for a scientific design of social distancing.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic is largely caused by airborne transmission, a phenomenon that rapidly gained the attention of the scientific community. Social distancing is of paramount importance to limit the spread of the disease, but to design social distancing rules on a scientific basis the process of dispersal of virus-containing respiratory droplets must be understood. Here, we demonstrate that available knowledge is largely inadequate to make predictions on the reach of infectious droplets emitted during a cough and on their infectious potential. We follow the position and evaporation of thousands of respiratory droplets by massive state-of-the-art numerical simulations of the airflow caused by a typical cough. We find that different initial distributions of droplet size taken from literatur

SUBMITTER: Rosti ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7773744 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature