Quantitative assessment of the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection: prospective and retrospective applications

Abstract Airborne transmission is a recognized pathway of contagion; however, it is rarely quantitatively evaluated. This study presents a novel approach for quantitative assessment of the individual infection risk of susceptible subjects exposed in indoor microenvironments in the presence of an asymptomatic infected SARS-CoV-2 subject. The approach allowed the maximum risk for an exposed healthy subject to be evaluated or, starting from an acceptable risk, the maximum exposure time. We applied the proposed approach to four distinct scenarios for a prospective assessment, highlighting that, in order to guarantee an acceptable individual risk of 10 −3 for exposed subjects in naturally ventilated indoor environments, the exposure time should be shorter than 20 min. The proposed approach was used for retrospective assessment of documented outbreaks in a restaurant in Guangzhou (China) and at a choir rehearsal in Mount Vernon (USA), showing that, in both cases, the high attack rate values can be justified only assuming the airborne transmission as the main route of contagion. Moreover, we shown that such outbreaks are not caused by the rare presence of a superspreader, but can be likely explained by the co-existence of conditions, including emission and exposure parameters, leading to a highly probable event, which can be defined as a “superspreading event”.