A new paper published by members of the team titled, “Increasing ventilation reduces SARS-CoV-2 airborne transmission in schools: A retrospective cohort study in Italy’s Marche region” in Frontiers in Public Health.
While increasing the ventilation rate is an important measure to remove inhalable virus-laden respiratory particles and lower the risk of infection, direct validation in schools with population-based studies is far from definitive. We investigated the strength of association between ventilation and SARS-CoV-2 transmission reported among the students of Italy’s Marche region in more than 10,000 classrooms, of which 316 were equipped with mechanical ventilation. The excellent agreement between the results from the retrospective cohort study and the outcome of the predictive theoretical approach makes it possible to assess the risk of airborne transmission for any indoor environment.
