Interactive Simulation of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions of Airborne Disease Transmission in Office Settings

Thomas Zimmerman, Neha Sharma, Hakan Bulu, Vanessa Burrowes, David Beymer and Vandana Mukherjee ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Zimmerman: IBM Research-Almaden, San Jose, CA 95120, USA
Neha Sharma: School of Computer Science, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Dr W, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada
Hakan Bulu: IBM Research-Almaden, San Jose, CA 95120, USA
Vanessa Burrowes: IBM Research Triangle Park, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA
David Beymer: IBM Research-Almaden, San Jose, CA 95120, USA
Vandana Mukherjee: IBM Research-Almaden, San Jose, CA 95120, USA

IJERPH, 2024, vol. 21, issue 11, 1-20

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions to workplace safety and productivity. A browser-based interactive disease transmission simulation was developed to enable managers and individuals (agents) to optimize safe office work activities during pandemic conditions. The application provides a user interface to evaluate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) policies on airborne disease exposure based on agents’ meeting patterns and room properties. Exposure is empirically calibrated using CO 2 as a proxy for viral aerosol dispersion. For the building studied, the major findings are that the cubicles during low occupancy produce unexpectedly high exposure, upgrading meetings to larger rooms reduces total average exposure by 44%, and when all meetings are conducted in large rooms, a 79% exposure reduction is realized.

Keywords: COVID; modeling; Wells-Riley; CO 2; aerosol; airborne; infection; transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/21/11/1413/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/21/11/1413/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:21:y:2024:i:11:p:1413-:d:1506689

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().