NEW DELHI: Room ventilation rates today must be 50 times higher than they were in 2020, before the pandemic, to keep Covid-19 infection risk from Omicron variants low, a research revealed.

Omicron and its variants demand ventilation about 50 times more than the virus did when it was first discovered in the world in 2020, according to building scientists and air quality experts who evaluated the ventilation rates of rooms required to keep the risk of infection under 1%.

The study, which was published in the journal Building Simulation, found that despite the obvious advantages of vaccination, the danger of airborne transmission in enclosed areas would be increased, necessitating a reevaluation of the corresponding ventilation precautions.

Also, the researchers discovered that air purifiers had no influence on transmission. According to them, in order to guarantee an infection probability of less than 1% for all three varieties of concern, ventilation rates had to be significantly raised. The ventilation rate, expressed in cubic metres per hour, is the rate at which new air enters a space or structure.

This translated to ventilation rates for Alpha of 650–1,200 cubic metres per hour for exposure times of 15 minutes, and 8,000–14,000 cubic metres per hour for exposure times of three hours.

The rate increased even more for Delta, going from 2,200 to 6,800 cubic metres per hour for 15 minutes to 26,000 to 80,000 cubic metres for three hours.

The ventilation rate for the Omicron variant reached 5,400-17,000 cubic metres per hour for 15 minutes and 64,000-250,000 cubic metres per hour for three hours (without discriminating between sublineages).

"According to Bin Zhao, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, "without any additional measures, this means the Alpha variant requires a ventilation rate about four times more aggressive than the ancestral strain, while the Delta and Omicron variants require ventilation rates roughly 20 times and 50 times greater, respectively. For actual construction engineering, this is challenging to meet." The good news is that the ventilation rate necessary to reduce the risk of infection to under 1% decreases to aboaut one-hundredth of these reported values if both the susceptible individual and the infected person are wearing N95 masks, said the researchers.

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