Upper-room ultraviolet air disinfection might help to reduce COVID-19 transmission in buildings: a feasibility study
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Abstract
As the world’s economies come out of the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an urgent need for technologies to mitigate COVID-19 transmission in confined spaces such as buildings. This feasibility study looks at one such technology, upper-room ultraviolet (UV) air disinfection, that can be safely used while humans are present in the room space, and which has already proven its efficacy as an intervention to inhibit the transmission of airborne diseases such as measles and tuberculosis. Using published data from various sources, it is shown that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, is highly likely to be susceptible to UV-C damage when suspended in air, with a UV susceptibility constant likely to be in the region 0.377–0.590 m 2 /J, similar to that for other aerosolised coronaviruses. As such, the UV-C flux required to disinfect the virus is expected to be acceptable and safe for upper-room applications. Through analysis of expected and worst-case scenarios, the efficacy of the upper-room UV-C approach for reducing COVID-19 transmission in confined spaces (with moderate but sufficient ceiling height) is demonstrated. Furthermore, it is shown that with SARS-CoV-2, it should be possible to achieve high equivalent air change rates using upper-room UV air disinfection, suggesting that the technology might be particularly applicable to poorly ventilated spaces.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.12.20129254: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:With respect to this, one limitation of our study is that we did not distinguish between the Z values achieved using a single-pass test rig, such as that used by Walker and Ko [29], and those achieved in real-life by an upper-room UVGI system. With the latter, because the irradiation process is fragmented, compared with a single-pass …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.12.20129254: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:With respect to this, one limitation of our study is that we did not distinguish between the Z values achieved using a single-pass test rig, such as that used by Walker and Ko [29], and those achieved in real-life by an upper-room UVGI system. With the latter, because the irradiation process is fragmented, compared with a single-pass system, it is thought that higher UV doses might be required to achieve equivalent levels of inactivation [12, 27]. However, while this specifically applies to aerosolised bacteria that can rapidly repair UV damage when the irradiation process becomes fragmented [38], it is not known to what extent this applies to viruses, which are not metabolically active, although it is known that through photoreactivation viruses can repair UV damage [39]. One great advantage of upper-room UVGI is that it can be retrospectively fitted into buildings provided that the floor to ceiling height is large enough to ensure that the UV field does not impinge on room occupants [15]. By installing such as system it is possible to effectively ‘turbo-charge’ the efficacy of the ventilation system. Indeed, our analysis suggests that it is possible to achieve >100 equivalent AC/h by installing upper-room UVGI. Using equation 9, we can calculate the UV rate constant, kuv, which can be thought of as the equivalent air change rate per second. Once known, this in turn can be used, together with the ventilation and particulate deposition rate constants, kv, and kd, in equation ...
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: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
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.
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