Research by a team of scientists in China has determined how high a virus can be expelled into the air when you flush a toilet. If you don’t care about the science and research, the answer is three feet above ground level. Thanks for the read, good bye. Now, if you want to know how they figured that out, here’s how:
Currently, a novel coronavirus named “SARS-CoV-2” is spreading rapidly across the world, causing a public health crisis, economic losses, and panic. Fecal–oral transmission is a common transmission route for many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.
Blocking the path of fecal–oral transmission, which occurs commonly in toilet usage, is of fundamental importance in suppressing the spread of viruses. However, to date, efforts at improving sanitary safety in toilet use have been insufficient. It is clear from daily experience that flushing a toilet generates strong turbulence within the bowl. Will this flushing-induced turbulent flow expel aerosol particles containing viruses out of the bowl? This paper adopts computational fluid dynamics to explore and visualize the characteristics of fluid flow during toilet flushing and the influence of flushing on the spread of virus aerosol particles.
The volume-of-fluid (VOF) model is used to simulate two common flushing processes (single-inlet flushing and annular flushing), and the VOF–discrete phase model (DPM) method is used to model the trajectories of aerosol particles during flushing. The simulation results are alarming in that massive upward transport of virus particles is observed, with 40%–60% of particles reaching above the toilet seat, leading to large-scale virus spread.
The main transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2 are droplets and direct contact, but some patients have developed gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting, showing that the virus can survive in the digestive tract. It is worth mentioning that, in March 2020, a research team from Sun Yat-Sen University found that fecal samples from some confirmed patients tested positive by nucleic acid detection, which provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has the possibility of fecal–oral transmission.
If you want to learn about the computer models used, you can read the full study here.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash