Predicting spatial distribution of infection risk of airborne transmission diseases in a hospital ward

This study attempt to integrate the Wells-Riley equation and computational fluid dynamics for analyzing the risk of airborne transmission diseases in a building. The new method can predict the spatial distribution of the infection risk of the airborne transmission diseases in a large hospital ward, while the Wells-Riley equation alone can only predict the overall infection risk in the whole building assuming a uniform distribution of the droplet nuclei concentration. This new method is applied to analyze the transmission risk in the well documented 8A ward SARS outbreak in a Hong Kong hospital in 2003. This study attempt to integrate the Wells-Riley equation and computational fluid dynamics for analyzing the risk of airborne transmission diseases in a building. The new method can predict the spatial distribution of the infection risk of the airborne transmission diseases in a large hospital ward, while the Wells-Riley equation alone can only predict the overall infection risk in the whole building assuming a uniform distribution of the droplet nuclei concentration. This new method is applied to analyze the transmission risk in the well documented 8A ward SARS outbreak in a Hong Kong hospital in 2003.