ArticleEnvironment international2021
Revisiting physical distancing threshold in indoor environment using infection-risk-based modeling.
Article in Environment international, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Risk of Infections Among Contacts of COVID-19 Cases in the Healthcare Setting: Experience of One University Hospital.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- An integrated airborne transmission risk assessment model for respiratory viruses: short- and long-range contributions.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Understanding lifetime and dispersion of cough-emitted droplets in air.Indoor + built environment : the journal of the International Society of the Built Environment · 2023Article
- A review on indoor airborne transmission of COVID-19- modelling and mitigation approaches.Journal of building engineering · 2023Review
- Efficacy of Do-It-Yourself air filtration units in reducing exposure to simulated respiratory aerosols.Building and environment · 2023Article
- Computational decision-support tools for urban design to improve resilience against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases: A systematic review.Progress in planning · 2023Article
- The Skagit County choir COVID-19 outbreak - have we got it wrong?Public health · 2023Review
- Role of pathogen-laden expiratory droplet dispersion and natural ventilation explaining a COVID-19 outbreak in a coach bus.Building and environment · 2022Article
- Exposure and respiratory infection risk via the short-range airborne route.Building and environment · 2022Article
- Uncertainty analysis of facemasks in mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission.Environmental pollution (Barking, Essex : 1987) · 2022Article
- When do children avoid infection risks: Lessons for schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.iScience · 2022Review
- Reducing airborne infection risk of COVID-19 by locating air cleaners at proper positions indoor: Analysis with a simple model.Building and environment · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Physical distancing has been an important policy to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in public settings. However, the current 1-2 m physical distancing rule is based on the physics of droplet transport and could not directly translate into infection risk. We therefore revisit the 2-m physical distancing rule by developing an infection-risk-based model for human speaking. The key modeling framework components include viral load, droplets dispersion and evaporation, deposition efficiency, viral dose-response rate and infection risk. The results suggest that the one-size-fits-all 2-m physical distancing rule derived from the pure droplet-physics-based model is not applicable under some realistic indoor settings, and may rather increase transmission probability of diseases. Especially, in thermally stratified environments, the infection risk could exhibit multiple peaks for a long distance beyond 2 m. With Sobol's sensitivity analysis, most variance of the risk is found to be significantly attributable to the variability in temperature gradient, exposure time and breathing height difference. Our study suggests there is no such magic 2 m physical distancing rule for all environments, but it needs to be used alongside other strategies, such as using face cover, reducing exposure time, and controlling the thermal stratification of indoor environment.
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