A Direct Infection Risk Model for CFD Predictions and Its Application to SARS-CoV-2 Aircraft Cabin Transmission

Current models to determine the risk of airborne disease infection are typically based on a backward quantification of observed infections, leading to uncertainties, e.g., due to the lack of knowledge whether the index person was a superspreader. In contrast, the present work presents a forward infection risk model that calculates the inhaled dose of infectious virus based on the virus emission rate of an emitter and a prediction of Lagrangian particle trajectories using CFD, taking both the residence time of individual particles and the biodegradation rate into account. The estimation of the dose-response is then based on data from human challenge studies. Considering the available data for SARS-CoV-2 from the literature, it is shown that the model can be used to estimate the risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 in the cabin of a Do728 single-aisle aircraft. However, the virus emission rate during normal breathing varies between different studies and also by about two orders of magnitude within one and the same study. A sensitivity analysis shows that the uncertainty in the input parameters leads to uncertainty in the prediction of the infection risk, which is between 0 and 12 infections among 70 passengers. This highlights the importance and challenges in terms of superspreaders for risk prediction, which are difficult to capture using standard backward calculations. Further, biological inactivation was found to have no significant impact on the risk of infection for SARS-CoV-2 in the considered aircraft cabin.