Hand-hygiene mitigation strategies against global disease spreading through the air transportation network

Christos Nicolaides; Demetris Avraam; Luis Cueto-Felgueroso; Marta C. González; Ruben Juanes

Using the above approximations, we find that that at any given moment, the percentage of passengers in an airport that have cleaned hands has an upper bound of 24%. Given that this is very optimistic upper bound of the reality, we assume and use in simulations that the status quo for the percentage of individuals that have clean hands in an airport at any given moment is 20%. To preserve a stable 20% hand cleanliness level over time in an airport, the hand washing engagement rate in the compartmental SIR WD model, that indicates the rate of hand washing per hour between individuals with non-cleaned hands, is calculated to be equal to p = 0.12 h -1 (i.e. 12% of dirty individuals wash their hands within an hour). This indicates the status quo of hand washing engagement rate. In the case that we would like to increase the level of hand cleanliness in an airport to 30% or 40% or 50% or 60% we need to increase the hand washing engagement rate to 0.21 h -1 or 0.32 h -1 or 0.49 h -1 or 0.73 h -1 respectively.