AUTHOR=Butail Sachit , Porfiri Maurizio TITLE=The Effect of An Emergency Evacuation on the Spread of COVID19 JOURNAL=Frontiers in Physics VOLUME=8 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.631264 DOI=10.3389/fphy.2020.631264 ISSN=2296-424X ABSTRACT=

In an emergency evacuation, people almost always come in close proximity as they quickly leave a built environment under a potential threat. With COVID19, this situation presents yet another challenge: that of getting unintentionally exposed to an infected individual. To assess the epidemiological consequences of an emergency evacuation, we expanded a popular pedestrian dynamic model to enable social distancing during a normal exit and analyze the effect of possible transmission through respiratory droplets and aerosol. Computer simulations point to a troubling outcome, whereby the benefits of a quick exit could be outweighed by the risk of infection.