Indoor environment monitoring as a measure to reduce epidemic spreading

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a major problem that has been neglected for a long time for various reasons - proper ventilation of indoor spaces in public buildings, schools, the industry, but also in households. The national legislation of developed countries usually sets some ventilation requirements but their parameters often differ and, most importantly, they are practically unenforceable in everyday life. According to the WHO, the majority of the population of European countries spends up to 90% of their time indoors, which, by the way, significantly contributed to the massive spread of the disease, transmitted mainly by inhalation of aerosols containing the Covid-19 virus. Our paper aims to describe the current state of legislation on indoor environment quality, with some studies dealing with population behavior and its impact on their health. Another goal of our paper is to describe a method that can detect the air exchange quality in a building and predict development of an indoor environment in order to be able to take appropriate measures well in advance, either by technical means of forced ventilation or by conventional methods of manual ventilation. In the future, timely and adequate ventilation should not only be one of the important ways to reduce spreading of respiratory diseases in the population but also, more generally, an important way to increase the quality of life and health of the European population.