Ventilation and Infection Transmission: lessons from COVID-19 and challenges for research

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised awareness of the importance of indoor environments and ventilation in an unprecedented way. Ventilation has transitioned from a minority discipline which typically had a focus on building energy performance and comfort, to mainstream public awareness leading to a raft of new research and the need to provide explanations of complex flows in a language for the public and consider the implications of introducing approaches such as CO2 monitoring and air cleaning devices which have never been tested at scale. This presentation considers what we have learnt about COVID-19 transmission and the implications of this for how we design and manage ventilation within the built environment. I will consider the evidence around transmission, the complexities of bringing together the physics of transmission and airflows with aspects around human behaviour, and what this means for the future of buildings and the gaps in knowledge relating to exposure to pathogens and air pollutants in indoor environments.