Disease transmission through expiratory aerosols on an urban bus

Abstract

Airborne respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 pose significant challenges to public transportation. Several recent outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 indicate the high risk of transmission among passengers on public buses if special precautions are not taken. This study presents a combined experimental and numerical analysis to identify transmission mechanisms on an urban bus and assess strategies to reduce risk. The effects of the ventilation and air-conditioning systems, opening windows and doors, and wearing masks are analyzed. Specific attention is paid to the transport of submicron- and micron-sized particles relevant to typical respiratory droplets. High-resolution instrumentation was used to measure size distribution and aerosol response time on a campus bus of the University of Michigan under these different conditions. Computational fluid dynamics was employed to measure the airflow within the bus and evaluate risk. A risk metric was adopted based on the number of particles exposed to susceptible passengers. The flow that carries these aerosols is predominantly controlled by the ventilation system, which acts to uniformly distribute the aerosol concentration throughout the bus while simultaneously diluting it with fresh air. The opening of doors and windows was found to reduce the concentration by approximately one half, albeit its benefit does not uniformly impact all passengers on the bus due to the recirculation of airflow caused by entrainment through windows. Finally, it was found that well fitted surgical masks, when worn by both infected and susceptible passengers, can nearly eliminate the transmission of the disease.