The Built Environment Assessment of Residential Areas during the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak

Keywords: Wuhan; COVID-19 outbreak; environmental factors; residential area layout; natural ventilation potential
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic has emerged as one of the biggest challenges, and the world is focused on preventing and controlling COVID-19. Although there is still insufficient understanding of how environmental conditions may impact the COVID-19 pandemic, airborne transmission is regarded as an important environmental factor that influences the spread of COVID-19. Aerosol transmission refers to a droplet nucleus composed of proteins and pathogens that lose water during the air suspension process, forming a droplet nucleus, which can float to a distance in the form of aerosols, causing long-distance transmission. The natural ventilation potential (NVP) is critical for airborne infection control in the micro-built environment, where infectious and susceptible people share air spaces. One case takes Wuhan as the research area, evaluating the NVP in residential areas to combat COVID-19 during the outbreak. I also determined four fundamental residential area layouts (point layout, parallel layout, center-around layout, and mixed layout) based on the semantic similarity model for point of interest (POI) picking. The study indicated the NVP change in temporal and spatial scale and efficiency of improvement in the residential area layout to combat COVID-19.