ventilation

It doesn’t take long for airborne coronavirus particles to make their way through a room. At first, only people sitting near an infected speaker are at high risk, but as the meeting or class goes on, the tiny aerosols can spread. That doesn’t mean everyone faces the same level of risk, however. As an engineer, I have been conducting experiments tracking how aerosols move, including those in the size range that can carry viruses. What I’ve found is important to understand as more people return to universities, offices and restaurants and more meetings move indoors as temperatures fall. It points to the highest-risk areas in rooms and why proper ventilation is crucial. As we saw this past week with President Donald Trump and others in Washington, the coronavirus can spread quickly in clo...

The vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs indoors, most of it from the inhalation of airborne particles that contain the coronavirus. The best way to prevent the virus from spreading in a home or business would be to simply keep infected people away. But this is hard to do when an estimated 40% of cases are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people can still spread the coronavirus to others. Masks do a decent job at keeping the virus from spreading into the environment, but if an infected person is inside a building, inevitably some virus will escape into the air. I am a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Much of my work has focused on how to control the transmission of airborne infectious diseases indoors, and I’ve been asked by my own univer...

Tag: ventilation

COVID-19: Where You Sit In A Classroom Matters, How Ventilation Can Help

How to use ventilation and air filtration to prevent the spread of coronavirus indoors