Model-based assessment of the risks of viral transmission in non-confined crowds

Abstract: This work aims to assess the risks of Covid-19 disease spread in diverse daily-life situations (referred to as scenarios) involving crowds of maskless pedestrians, mostly outdoors. More concretely, we develop a method to infer the global number of new infections from patchyobservations of pedestrians. The method relies on ad hoc spatially resolved models for disease transmissionvia virus-laden respiratory droplets, which are fit to existing exposure studies about Covid-19. The approach is applied to the detailed field data about pedestrian trajectories and orientations that we acquired during the pandemic. This allows us to rank the investigated scenarios by the infection risks that they present; importantly, the obtained hierarchy of risks is conserved across all our transmission models (except the most pessimistic ones): Street caf{\'e}s present the largest average rate of new infections caused by an attendant, followed by busy outdoor markets, and then metro and train stations, whereas the risks incurred while walking on fairly busy streets (average density around 0.1 person/m${}^2$) are comparatively quite low. While none of our ad hoc models can claim accuracy, their converging predictions lend credence to these findings.} In scenarios with a moving crowd, we find that density is the main factor influencing the estimated infection rate. Finally, our study explores the efficiency of street and venue redesigns in mitigating the viral spread: While the benefits of enforcing one-way foot traffic in (wide) walkways are unclear, changing the geometry of queues substantially affects disease transmission risks.