Practical Steps to Improve Air Flow in Long-Term Care Resident Rooms to Reduce COVID-19 Infection Risk

Abstract

The potential for spread of COVID-19 infections in skilled nursing facilities and other long-term care sites poses new challenges for nursing home administrators to protect patients and staff. It is anticipated that as acute care hospitals reach capacity, nursing homes may retain COVID-19 infected residents longer prior to transferring to an acute care hospital. This article outlines 5 pragmatic steps that long-term care facilities can take to manage airflow within resident rooms to reduce the potential for spread of infectious airborne droplets into surrounding areas, including hallways and adjacent rooms, using strategies adapted from negative-pressure isolation rooms in acute care facilities.

An overview of literature on COVID-19, MERS and SARS: Using text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation

“…Topic 4’s representative paper ‘provides a comprehensive structural genomics and interactomics road-maps of’ SARS-CoV-2 [ 54 ]. Topic 5’s representative study proposes five practical steps to prevent the spreading of infectious disease in Long-Term Resident Rooms [ 55 ]. Topic 6’s representative paper analyses ‘the clinical characteristics and laboratory findings’ of COVID-19 cases [ 4 ].…”

The design of safe classrooms of educational buildings for facing contagions and transmission of diseases: A novel approach combining audits, calibrated energy models, building performance (BPS) and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations

“…Linch and Goring [19] outlined, for the long-term care facilities, some points for improving the safety of the environments against possible transmission of the Sars-CoV-2, and these involve the modification of patients’ rooms to negative pressure, for limiting the contamination of other spaces. These key points concern the suitable evaluation of space volumes, ventilation requirements and differential pressure, the installation of additional exhaust fans, the increment of the overall air filtration efficiency, the correct management of doors (i.e., closed doors between corridors and wards, open doors between wards and bathroom, if here the exhaust air is extracted), the respecting of all guidelines for the prevention of infections as proposed by the dedicated Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).…”

COVID19 is a seasonal climate-driven disease across both hemispheres

“…The positive correlations we found for the summer months (e.g. Fig 2) during the seasonal low of cases may too reflect community transmission in public temperature-controlled buildings such as care homes (40,41). They may also result from social clustering and increased contact due to warm weather activities (42).…”