COVID-19. Transport of respiratory droplets in a microclimatologic urban scenario

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Abstract

Although there are some recent studies which intent to address the spread of respiratory droplets through the air, these correspond to indoor conditions or outdoor situations which not take into account realistic scenario. Less attention has been paid to the spread of respiratory droplets in outdoor environments under microclimatologic turbulent wind and which is of growing importance given the current COVID-19 epidemic. We implement a computational model describing a sneezing person in an urban scenario under a medium intensity climatological wind. Turbulence was described with a wall-modeled Large Eddy Simulation model and the spread of respiratory droplets by using a lagrangian approach. Results show the spread of respiratory droplets is characterized by the dynamics of two groups of droplets of different sizes: larger droplets (400 – 900 μm) are spread between 2–5 m during 2.3 s while smaller (100 – 200 μm) droplets are transported a larger range between 8–11 m by the action of the turbulent wind in 14.1 s average. Given the uncertainty of potential contagion over this way and with this reach, these efforts are an intent to contribute to shine a light on the possibility of adopting stricter self-care and distancing measures.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.17.20064394: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: Please consider improving the rainbow (“jet”) colormap(s) used on page 4. At least one figure is not accessible to readers with colorblindness and/or is not true to the data, i.e. not perceptually uniform.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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