DENVER — Airborne diseases like COVID-19 can easily spread between apartments in multi-family housing buildings using a common bathroom ventilation system, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and several other institutions.
Shelly Miller, a University of Colorado Boulder professor emerita of mechanical engineering and the study’s senior author, said the research was inspired by an incident in Spain.
“I lived in Barcelona, Spain, for one year, 2021 to 2022, and many of the homes are multifamily housing units, you know, tall buildings, lots of apartments. And I was really intrigued by the design and by how they’re built. And they’re all connected by patios and, many of them, by bathroom ventilation systems. And because I lived there, I heard through some colleagues I was working with in Spain that there had been an outbreak in Santander,” Miller said…