Fluid dynamics of COVID-19 airborne infection suggests urgent data for a scientific design of social distancing

The COVID-19 pandemic is largely caused by airborne transmission, a phenomenon that rapidly gained the attention of the scientific community. Social distancing is of paramount importance to limit the spread of the disease, but to design social distancing rules on a scientific basis the process of dispersal of virus-containing respiratory droplets must be understood. Here, we demonstrate that available knowledge is largely inadequate to make predictions on the reach of infectious droplets emitted during a cough and on their infectious potential. We follow the position and evaporation of thousands of respiratory droplets by massive state-of-the-art numerical simulations of the airflow caused by a typical cough. We find that different initial distributions of droplet size taken from literature and different ambient relative humidity lead to opposite conclusions: (1) most versus none of the viral content settles in the first 1–2 m; (2) viruses are carried entirely on dry nuclei versus on liquid droplets; (3) small droplets travel less than 2.5 m versus more than 7.5 m. We point to two key issues that need to be addressed urgently in order to provide a scientific foundation to social distancing rules: (11) a careful characterisation of the initial distribution of droplet sizes; (12) the infectious potential of viruses carried on dry nuclei versus liquid droplets.