Estimation of airborne viral emission: quanta emission rate of SARS-CoV-2 for infection risk assessment

Giorgio Buonanno; Luca Stabile; Lidia Morawska

considers that the air is well-mixed within the modelled space. The authors highlight that in 205 epidemic modeling, where the target is the spread of the disease in the community, it is impossible 206 to specify the geometries, the ventilation, and the locations of the infectious sources in each 207 microenvironment. Therefore, adopting the well-mixed assumption is generally more reasonable 208 than hypothesizing about specific environments and scenarios because the results must be 209 interpreted on a statistical basis (Sze To and Chao, 2010). 210 To where IR is the inhalation rate of the exposed subject (which is, once again, affected by the subject's 215 activity level) and T is the total time of exposure (h). From the infection risk R, the number of 216 susceptible people infected after the exposure time can be easily determined by multiplying it by 217 the number of exposed individuals. In fact, equations (3) and (4) were adopted to evaluate the 218 infection risk of different exposure scenarios of Italian microenvironments hereinafter reported. 219