VENTILAÇÃO NATURAL COMO INSTRUMENTO NA REDUÇÃO DO RISCO DE PROPAGAÇÃO DA COVID-19

ESTUDO DE CASO EM SALAS DE AULA

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic created the need for social isolation measures around the world. In this context, the most diverse establishments were closed, being educational institutions, places where there is a common concentration of students, one of the most affected activities. This paper seeks to verify the sanitary conditions of classrooms based on their ventilation rates, as well as to establish safe reoccupation parameters in relation to the transmission of COVID-19. Given the global scale of school interdictions, there is a large volume of rooms to be assessed, therefore, there is a utility for a tool that allows a brief assessment of the natural ventilation conditions of each room. For this purpose, a simplified spreadsheet was developed, which considers the characteristics of the building, its surroundings, and its geographic location. Based on these ventilation rates, and on hygienic ventilation parameters obtained in the literature, the maximum occupancy of each classroom of the Technology and Urbanism Center at the State University of Londrina was calculated, adopting pessimistic parameters of terrain roughness and wind speed. The probability of contagion of the disease was estimated for each classroom considering its original maximum occupation, as well as for reduced capacity, according to the methodology proposed by Jimenez (2020). The rooms were also classified according to their numbers of air changes per hour, in ranges proposed by Allen et al (2020). For some of the rooms evaluated, the reduction in maximum occupancy only considering a social distance of 2 meters is unable to maintain ventilation rates at adequate levels to reduce the risk of spreading the disease.