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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a proper risk assessment of respiratory pathogens in indoor settings. At CERN, the Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) unit has started in 2020 to introduce the importance of this airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens and, in an original effort, to model indoor transmission of SARS-CoV-2, rationalising in a single model the knowledge accumulated by the scientific community. The model was then further developed and evolved into a robust, practical, user-friendly tool, thanks to the substantial participation of engineers, physicists and computer scientists throughout other CERN Departments. Here we will present the resulting tool, the COVID Airborne Risk Assessment (CARA), as well as the underlying physical model, which assesses the potential exposure to airborne viruses. The model results from a multidisciplinary approach linking physical, mechanical and biological domains. The tool allows decision makers or facility managers to assess their indoor setting, by providing a probability of infection computed in several everyday-life settings and with various mitigation measures. Fully open-source and now published in a peer-reviewed journal [1], CARA is used by a number of Organisations and individuals around the world.
[1] A. Henriques, N. Mounet, L. Aleixo, P. Elson, J. Devine, G. Azzopardi, M. Andreini, M. Rognlien, N. Tarocco and J. Tang (2022). “Modelling airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 using CARA: risk assessment for enclosed spaces”, Interface Focus, 12:20210076, http://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2021.0076.