Forecasting the transmission trends of respiratory infectious diseases with an exposure-risk-based model at the microscopic level

Influences of obstacle factors on the transmission trends of respiratory infectious diseases in indoor public places

“…These pedestrian-based epidemic models describe the disease transmission process with time-varying personal physical distances during individual movements. There are several alternative pedestrian-based epidemics fundamental models, such as the exposure risk with virion-laden particles (ERP) model [ 10 ], the EXPOSED model [ 35 ], the fixed exposure-risk unit (FERU) model [ 36 ], and the exposure risk with quality (ERQ) model [ 37 ]. As the ERP model has been verified with real-world data and exhibits superior prediction performance than FERU and ERQ models, it is adopted here as the fundamental model.…”

“…The ERP model [ 10 ] focuses on the typical symptom of most RIDs, i.e., coughing. The model has four components, and they are introduced below.…”

“…Besides, we consider the breathing height area of susceptible people to set the cough simulation domain, as shown in Appendix A . According to previous studies [ 10 , 12 , 44 ], as the particle volume fraction in the cough flow is low, the Eulerian-Lagrangian method is selected: the continuous phase (e.g., the flow field) is modeled by the Eulerian method; the discrete phase (e.g., cough particles) is modeled by the Lagrangian method; and the discrete phase exchanges mass, energy, and momentum with the continuous phase. Here, the renormalization group (RNG) k-ε model is used as the turbulence model, and the discrete phase model (DPM) is adopted for the particle diffusion [ 45 ].…”

“…Besides, to help describe the change of cough particles with the time-varying distance, we construct several representative planes with the length of meters along the “y” axis and more details can be found in Ref. [ 10 ]. Hence, when and , we have where is the time interval between time and ; , and are parameters of the fitted Gaussian distribution function for the -th representative plane.…”

“…RIDs including COVID-19, SARS, and MERS are harmful to public health [ 6 ], which always bring sequelae such as fatigue and dyspnea, and even cause the loss of life expectancy [ 7 , 8 ]. To reduce the potential risk of ongoing or re-emerging RIDs, the safety of individual staying spaces is of paramount concern [ 9 , 10 ]. Considering the fact that most individual contacts take place in indoor public places, recognizing the effective spatial setups in indoor public spaces with human crowds is essential for the prevention and control of RIDs [ [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] ].…”