Comparison of cough particle exposure for indoor commercial and aircraft cabin spaces

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Abstract

To compare the transport of respiratory pathogens, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to track particles released by coughing from a passenger on a Boeing 737 aircraft, and by a person in a comparable indoor commercial space. Simulation data were post-processed to calculate the amounts of particles inhaled by nearby persons in both environments. The effects of different airflow rates, placement of air inlets, positioning and distances between index (coughing) and susceptible (inhaling) persons were also analyzed. The removal of airborne particles from the indoor environment, due ventilation and deposition onto surfaces, was compared to that of an aircraft cabin. In an aircraft cabin 80% of the particles were removed 5 to 12 times faster than in the indoor commercial space; ultimately resulting in 7 times less particulate mass inhaled in the aircraft cabin.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.24.21254275: (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: Thank you for sharing your data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: The cases studied in the present work represented typical aircraft cabin and ICS environments. However, other factors that are expected to affect particulate transmission have not been studied, either here or elsewhere. The limitations for the aircraft cabin model are well covered in our earlier publication [2] and thus are omitted here. The following are limitations of the ICS model. They represent areas where the analysis is limited by the large number of variables that would need to be explored for a complete treatment: A myriad of factors defined by human behavior may all have an effect on air flow and the plume of a cough by an infectious index cougher. This study was configured as stated in the methods section and the values calculated are for those stated configurations. As a perturbation study, the work presented herein only addresses the exposure over the time period necessary to remove the cough particles from the environment. Using a method to estimate the total mass of inhalation over time for both continuous (e.g., breathing or talking) and discontinuous (e.g., coughing) processes may improve our understanding of the risk of infection. However as of yet, the number of viruses per mass exhaled, that is required to cause an infection, has not been determined for COVID-19 with sufficient rigor. Estimates of infectious dose still vary by at least two orders of magnitude and may be defined more by the variation in human biology than by other factors. Reco...

    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 7. 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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