Study: The Importance of Ventilation and Wearing a Mask in School Face-to-Face Page all

KOMPAS.com- The plan to open it school face to face in the midst of the corona virus pandemic, worrying many people. However, a study reveals the system ventilation good habits and habits put on a mask is an important key to ensuring other indoor activities.

Related the spread of Covid-19, many people are anxious with coronavirus transmission which may have the potential to increase when activities such as schools reopen.

However, a new study from the University of Central Florida, United States of America, show that face mask and good ventilation systems, are more important than social distancing in reducing the spread of Covid-19 in classrooms.

“This research is important because it provides guidance on how we understand safety in indoor environments,” said Michael Kinzel, assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and co-author of the study. Science Daily, Wednesday (7/4/2021).

In this study, the scientists found that the aerosol transmission route did not indicate a need for social distancing of about 2 meters while wearing a mask.

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The study, which emphasizes the importance of masks and indoor ventilation systems, has been published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

“The results of this study highlight that with masks, the likelihood of transmission is not reduced by simply increasing physical distance, which emphasizes how the rule of wearing masks may be key to increasing capacity in schools and elsewhere,” explained the researcher.

In the study, the researchers created a classroom computer model with students and a teacher, then modeled airflow and disease transmission, and calculated the risk of airborne transmission.

This model school classroom is 709 square feet with a ceiling that is 9 feet high, similar to a smaller university classroom.

Also read: In addition to wearing masks, ventilation is the key to preventing Covid-19 transmission

This model with a ventilation system has disguised the potential for Covid-19 infection in students and teachers who wear masks in front of the class.

Next, the researchers examined the classroom using two scenarios, namely a ventilated and non-ventilated classroom, and using two models, Wells-Riley and Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Wells-Riley is commonly used to assess indoor transmission probabilities and Computational Fluid Dynamics is often used to understand the aerodynamics of cars, airplanes, and submarine underwater movements.

As a result, wearing a mask has been shown to be beneficial in preventing direct aerosol exposure, because masks make the exhaled air warmer and weaker. That, says Kinzel, causes the aerosol to move vertically, and prevents it from reaching nearby students.

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