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Safety Precautions and Operating Procedures in an ABSL-4 Laboratory: 3. Aerobiology
Published on: October 3, 2016
Dynamic assessment of the risk of airborne viral infection
Alessandro Cammarata1, Giuliano Cammarata2
1Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Architettura, Univerità degli Studi di Catania, Catania, Italy.
Abstract:
This paper applies the Rudnick and Milton method through the dynamic evaluation of the probability of airborne contagion, redefining all parameters and variables in discretized form. To adapt the calculation of the risk of contagion to real needs, scenarios are used to define the presence of people, infected subjects, the hourly production of the quanta of infection, and the calculation of the concentration of CO2 produced by exhalation in the air. Three case studies are discussed: a school, an office, a commercial activity. Complex scenarios include environmental sanitization, a variable number of people, and the possibility of simulating work shifts. The dynamic evaluation of the quanta of infection is also estimated, not foreseen by the Rudnick and Milton model, and involves updating the average values of the equivalent fraction of the indoor air with an improvement in the accuracy of the calculation due to the reduction of improper peaks of the stationary variables.
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