The year 2020 has seen the world gripped by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not the first time, nor will it be last, that our increasingly globalized world has been significantly affected by the emergence of a new disease. In much of the Northern Hemisphere, the academic year begins in September, and for many countries, September 2020 marked the return to full schooling after some period of enforced closure due to COVID-19. In this paper, we focus on the airborne spread of disease and investigate the likelihood of transmission in school environments. It is crucial to understand the risk airborne infection from COVID-19 might pose to pupils, teachers, and their wider social groups. We use monitored CO₂ data from 45 classrooms in 11 different schools from within the UK to estimate the likelihood of infection occurring within classrooms regularly attended by the same staff and pupils. We determine estimates of the number of secondary infections arising via the airborne route over pre/asymptomatic periods on a rolling basis. Results show that, assuming relatively quiet desk-based work, the number of secondary infections is likely to remain reassuringly below unity; however, it can vary widely between classrooms of the same school even when the same ventilation system is present. Crucially, the data highlight significant variation with the seasons with January being nearly twice as risky as July. We show that such seasonal variations in risk due to changes in ventilation rates are robust and our results hold for wide variations in disease parameterizations, suggesting our results may be applied to a number of different airborne diseases.

中文翻译：

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由于从监测的二氧化碳推断出的通风变化，学校空气传播感染风险的季节性变化

2020 年，全世界都受到 COVID-19 大流行的影响。我们日益全球化的世界因一种新疾病的出现而受到严重影响，这不是第一次，也不会是最后一次。在北半球的大部分地区，学年从 9 月开始，对于许多国家来说，2020 年 9 月标志着在因 COVID-19 强制关闭一段时间后恢复全面教育。在本文中，我们关注疾病的空气传播并调查在学校环境中传播的可能性。了解 COVID-19 空气传播感染可能对学生、教师及其更广泛的社会群体构成的风险至关重要。我们使用受监控的 CO ₂来自英国境内 11 所不同学校的 45 间教室的数据，以估计同一教职员工和学生经常参加的教室内发生感染的可能性。我们在滚动的基础上确定了在前/无症状时期通过空气传播途径引起的继发感染数量的估计值。结果表明，假设相对安静的办公桌工作，继发感染的数量可能会令人欣慰地保持在统一以下；然而，即使存在相同的通风系统，同一所学校的教室之间也会有很大差异。至关重要的是，数据突出了季节的显着变化，1 月份的风险几乎是 7 月份的两倍。