Dynamics and Mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 Laden Droplet Clouds in the Hospital Environment

Som Dutta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Som Dutta, Ketan Mittal, Holland Kartchner, Jasmin Ahmed, Aditya Parik, Anton Kadomtsev, Jackson Marchant, Jasmin Ahmed, Landon Berry, Gabrielle Van Brunt

SARS-CoV-2 is sweeping the world, but our current understanding of transmission pathways in hospitals and other critical indoor areas is lacking. The major point of contention is about viability of air-borne transmission, which is partly fueled by a lack of mechanistic understanding of how virus-laden droplet clouds get transported and mixed within the indoor environment.

The aim of this study is to fundamentally improve our understanding of person-to-person transmission of airborne respiratory infectious diseases like COVID-19. Our findings will help scientist develop non-pharmacological measures to reduce the droplet based viral loading in a room, making it safer for health care professionals (HCPs). The hypothesis is that aerosolized droplets from human airways contaminate rooms more significantly than currently expected. We will use high-fidelity multiphase large eddy simulations (LES) to determine the dynamics of the virus-laden droplet-cloud in an idealized hospital setting, to understand how long the pathogen-cloud persists and where the particles settle. The final goal is to devise simple non-pharmacological methods to reduce the virus-loading.