Spatial dynamics of airborne infectious diseases

TL;DR

This paper models the spatial spread of airborne infectious diseases indoors, highlighting how droplet size, airflow, and diffusion influence transmission dynamics and identifying conditions that can inhibit disease spread.

Contribution

It introduces a spatial epidemiological model incorporating airflow effects and droplet size, providing new insights into airborne disease transmission mechanisms.

Findings

Larger droplets can cause infectious waves or outbreaks.

Droplet diffusion is an inefficient transport mode.

A threshold airflow velocity can prevent disease transmission.

Abstract

Disease outbreaks, such as those of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003 and the 2009 pandemic A(H1N1) influenza, have highlighted the potential for airborne transmission in indoor environments. Respirable pathogen-carrying droplets provide a vector for the spatial spread of infection with droplet transport determined by diffusive and convective processes. An epidemiological model describing the spatial dynamics of disease transmission is presented. The effects of an ambient airflow, as an infection control, are incorporated leading to a delay equation, with droplet density dependent on the infectious density at a previous time. It is found that small droplets ($\sim 0.4\ \mu$m) generate a negligible infectious force due to the small viral load and the associated duration they require to transmit infection. In contrast, larger droplets ($\sim 4\ \mu$m) can lead to an infectious wave propagating through a fully susceptible population or a secondary infection outbreak for a localised susceptible population. Droplet diffusion is found to be an inefficient mode of droplet transport leading to minimal spatial spread of infection. A threshold air velocity is derived, above which disease transmission is impaired even when the basic reproduction number $R_{0}$ exceeds unity.