Calculate your risk of catching COVID indoors or out with this handy new chart

Against this bleak picture, we yearn to get back to normal. We’d like to meet friends in a pub or have them over for dinner. We’d like our struggling business to thrive like it did before the pandemic. We’d like our children to return to their once-familiar routine of in-person schooling and after-school activities. We’d like to ride on a bus, sing in a choir, get back to the gym, or dance in a nightclub without fear of catching COVID.

Which of these activities is safe? And how safe, exactly? These were the questions we sought to answer in our latest research.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, spreads mainly by airborne transmission. So, the key to preventing transmission is to understand how airborne particles behave, which requires knowledge from physics and chemistry.

Air is a fluid made up of invisible, rapidly and randomly moving molecules, so airborne particles disperse over time indoors, such as in a room or on a bus. An infected person may exhale particles containing the virus, and the closer you are to them, the more likely you are to inhale some virus-containing particles. But the longer the period you both spend in the room, the more spread out the virus will become. If you are outdoors, the space is almost infinite, so the virus doesn’t build up in the same way. However, someone can still transmit the virus if you’re close to them.

Viral particles can be emitted every time an infected person breathes, but especially if their breathing is deep (such as when exercising) or involves vocalization (such as when speaking or singing). While wearing a well-fitting mask reduces transmission because the mask blocks the release of the virus, the unmasked infected person who sits quietly in a corner is much less likely to infect you than one who approaches you and starts a heated argument.

All variants of SARS-CoV-2 are equally airborne, but the chance of catching COVID depends on the transmissibility (or contagiousness) of the variant (delta was more contagious than previous variants, but omicron is more contagious still) and on how many people are currently infected (the prevalence of the disease). As of January 8, more than 98% of COVID infections in the U.K. are omicron, and 1 person in 15 is currently infected (prevalence 6.7%). While omicron appears more transmissible, it also seems to produce less severe illness, especially in vaccinated people.

Likelihood of becoming infected

In our study, we have quantified how the different influences on transmission change your risk of getting sick: viral factors (transmissibility/prevalence), people factors (masked/unmasked, exercising/sitting, vocalizing/quiet), and air-quality factors (indoors/outdoors, big room/small room, crowded/uncrowded, ventilated/unventilated).

We did this by carefully studying empirical data on how many people became infected in superspreader events where key parameters, such as the room size, room occupancy, and ventilation levels, were well-documented and by representing how transmission happens with a mathematical model.

The new chart, adapted from our paper, and shown below, gives a percentage likelihood of becoming infected in different situations (you can make it bigger by clicking on it).

Trish Greenhalgh is a professor of primary care health sciences at the University of Oxford, Jose-Luis Jimenez is a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder, Shelly Miller is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Zhe Peng is a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.