MS28: Modelling COVID-19 Transmission in Indoor Spaces

It will take time to achieve immunity against SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination. In the meantime, finding ways to safely lift restrictions and resume economic and social activities is of paramount importance. Therefore, indoors transmission of COVID-19 has been intensively researched since the beginning of the pandemic, with emphasis on quantifying viral transmission in high-risk locations such as healthcare clinics, schools, public transport, nursing homes and supermarkets.

In this minisymposium, we present several mathematical approaches for modelling the dynamics of transmission of COVID-19 in diverse indoor locations. Deterministic and stochastic mathematical models are considered and are solved using a combination of analytical and numerical techniques. In many cases, Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations are employed to model air flows and transport of SARS-CoV-2 in detail. The effects of ventilation, antiviral technologies, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions are presented. Many of these results have been used to inform policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and elsewhere.

The proposed mini-symposium encompasses a variety of different fields that are of interest to the industrial mathematics community. ECMI’s members hosted several sessions on COVID-19 and there has been an intensive activity from modellers in the community. However, understanding the transmission of the virus is still an open challenge and the minisymposium talks present recent advances in this direction.

Thursday, April 15, 10:20-12:00 (Chairs: K. Kaouri / I.M. Griffiths)

1. 10:20 Dbouk Talib, Dimitris Drikakis, Present and Future of Modelling and Simulation for Airborne Virus Transmission
2. 10:45 Sam Rolland, Hamid Tamaddon Jahromi, Jason Jones, Alberto Coccarelli, Igor Sazonov, Chris Kershaw, Chedly Tizaoui, Peter Holliman, David Worsley, Hywel Thomas, Perumal Nithiarasu, Modelling Ozone Disinfection Process for Creating Covid-19 Secure Spaces
3. 11:10 Zechariah Lau, Ian Griffiths, Aaron English, Raquel Gonzalez Farina, Alexander Ramage, Katerina Kaouri, Modelling Airborne COVID-19 Transmission in Indoor Spaces
4. 11:35 Joshua W. Moore, Zechariah Lau, Katerina Kaouri, Trevor C. Dale, Thomas E. Woolley, A General Computational Framework for COVID-19 Modelling, With Applications to Testing Varied Interventions in Education Environments