A review on the transmission of COVID-19 based on cough/sneeze/breath flows

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has recently had a dramatic impact on society. The understanding of the disease transmission is of high importance to limit its spread between humans. The spread of the virus in air strongly depends on the flow dynamics of the human airflows. It is, however, known that predicting the flow dynamics of the human airflows can be challenging due to different particles sizes and the turbulent aspect of the flow regime. It is thus recommended to present a deep analysis of different human airflows based on the existing experimental investigations. A validation of the existing numerical predictions of such flows would be of high interest to further develop the existing numerical model for different flow configurations. This paper presents a literature review of the experimental and numerical studies on human airflows, including sneezing, coughing and breathing. The dynamics of these airflows for different droplet sizes is discussed. The influence of other parameters, such as the viscosity and relative humidity, on the germs transmission is also presented. Finally, the efficacy of using a facemask in limiting the transmission of COVID-19 is investigated. IntroductionAt present, the world is suffering from the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus disease (SARS-CoV-2) commonly known as COVID-19 which is an RNA virus that has a single strand and has similarity to SARS-CoV-1 in terms of evolutionary development and diversification [67,112]. This virus can cause lung inflammation, the main symptoms of COVID-19 patients are dry cough, fatigue, and fever [112]. In March 11th 2020, the WHO announced that COVID-19 became a pandemic. Healthcare infrastructure systems worldwide are overwhelmed due to the coronavirus pandemic because of its long incubation period and high contagiousness [32,52]. Current study shows that about 35% of infected persons do not exhibit overt symptoms [12] and this may unintentionally cause tremendous spread a e-mail:

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