Risk Assessment of Infection by Airborne Droplets and Aerosols at Different Levels of Cardiovascular Activity

Since end of 2019 the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is threatening humanity. Despite the fact that various scientists across the globe try to shed a light on this new respiratory disease, it is not yet fully understood. Unlike many studies on the geographical spread of the pandemic, including the study of external transmission routes, this work focuses on droplet and aerosol transport and their deposition inside the human airways. For this purpose, a digital replica of the human airways is used and particle transport under various levels of cardiovascular activity in enclosed spaces is studied by means of computational fluid dynamics. The influence of the room size, where the activity takes place, and the aerosol concentration is studied. The contribution aims to assess the risk of various levels of exercising while inhaling infectious pathogens to gain further insights in the deposition behavior of aerosols in the human airways. The size distribution of the expiratory droplets or aerosols plays a crucial role for the disease onset and progression. As the size of the expiratory droplets and aerosols differs for various exhaling scenarios, reported experimental particle size distributions are taken into account when setting up the environmental conditions. To model the aerosol deposition we employ OpenFOAM by using an Euler-Lagrangian frame including Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes resolved turbulent flow. Within this study, the effects of different exercise levels and thus breathing rates as well as particle size distributions and room sizes are investigated to enable new insights into the local particle deposition in the human airway and virus loads. A general observation can be made that exercising at higher levels of activity is increasing the risk to develop a severe cause of the COVID-19 disease due to the increased aerosolized volume that reaches into the lower airways, thus the knowledge of the inhaled particle dynamics in the human airways at various exercising levels provides valuable information for infection control strategies.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the transport and deposition of droplets and aerosols in the human airways, aiming to assess the risk of inhaling infectious pathogens during various levels of cardiovascular activity. Different exercise levels increase the risk of developing severe cases of COVID-19 due to increased aerosolized volume reaching into the lower airways.