Room-return ventilation and N95 respirator policies for reducing airborne pathogen exposure on hospital wards

Abstract

Background: Understanding interactions between the components of bundled mitigation measures can aid the prospective evaluation of hospital infection control programmes. This work provides a prospective, simulation-based examination of engineering controls (re-configured ventilation systems) designed to protect the healthcare workforce from airborne exposure on a ward for patients with acute respiratory infections such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Method: We developed and applied an agent-based computational model of nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks to evaluate the combined effects of adding return ventilation in patient rooms (room-return ventilation) and a point-of-care N95 respi..