Transmission analysis by coupled simulation of unsteady concentration distribution and epidemiological model in hospital space

Abstract

The indoor environment can play a significant role in the transmission of and exposure to various contaminants. In the case of some emerging aerial infections, such as those caused by influenza virus and tuberculosis virus, the airborne route of transmission is considered to be important for evaluating the health risk associated with exposure to contaminants in indoors. In this study, we focus on the coupled simulation of unsteady and non-uniform distribution of infectious contaminant concentration and transmission propagation, which directly indicates the infectious titer of target infectious contaminant and the changes in the population densities of Susceptible (S), Exposed (E), Infectious (I), and Recovered (R) in a hospital space. Furthermore, improved exposure model that separated respiratory exposure and contact exposure is proposed in this study and the sensitivity analysis was executed. Especially, we report the prediction results of the time and spatial change in the infectious risk when the indoor environmental conditions in university hospital space, type of contaminant and prediction models are changed.