Edwards, A.J., King, M.-F., Noakes, C.J. et al. (2 more authors) (2024) The Wells–Riley model revisited: Randomness, heterogeneity, and transient behaviours. Risk Analysis: an international journal. ISSN 0272-4332
Abstract
The Wells–Riley model has been widely used to estimate airborne infection risk, typically from a deterministic point of view (i.e., focusing on the average number of infections) or in terms of a per capita probability of infection. Some of its main limitations relate to considering well-mixed air, steady-state concentration of pathogen in the air, a particular amount of time for the indoor interaction, and that all individuals are homogeneous and behave equally. Here, we revisit the Wells–Riley model, providing a mathematical formalism for its stochastic version, where the number of infected individuals follows a Binomial distribution. Then, we extend the Wells–Riley methodology to consider transient behaviours, randomness, and population heterogeneity. In particular, we provide analytical solutions for the number of infections and the per capita probability of infection when: (i) susceptible individuals remain in the room after the infector leaves, (ii) the duration of the indoor interaction is random/unknown, and (iii) infectors have heterogeneous quanta production rates (or the quanta production rate of the infector is random/unknown). We illustrate the applicability of our new formulations through two case studies: infection risk due to an infectious healthcare worker (HCW) visiting a patient, and exposure during lunch for uncertain meal times in different dining settings. Our results highlight that infection risk to a susceptible who remains in the space after the infector leaves can be nonnegligible, and highlight the importance of incorporating uncertainty in the duration of the indoor interaction and the infectivity of the infector when estimating risk.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | airborne transmission, probability, risk assessment, stochastic, Wells–Riley |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Applied Mathematics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Mar 2024 09:15 |
Last Modified: | 27 Mar 2024 12:16 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/risa.14295 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:209941 |