Public surface disinfection every 2 hours can reduce the infection risk of norovirus in airports up to 83%.

Norovirus outbreaks during air travel is common. Previous studies have focused on aircraft cabins, but airports deserve equal attention. Norovirus primarily spreads through surface transmission, and within airports, frequent interactions among passengers and their touch with public surfaces offer potential pathways for spread via contaminated surfaces (1-4). To investigate the risk of norovirus infection among passengers through surface transmission at airports, the authors collected real touch data from passengers in different zones of the airport. The aim was to quantify risk of norovirus transmission through surface touch in different airport areas and evaluate the effectiveness of various interventions targeting surface transmission. The study identified airport restaurants as high-risk locations for norovirus transmission via surface transmission. Simulation results indicated that without any preventive measures, restaurants at airports exhibited the highest risk of norovirus transmission, with an infection probability of 8.8×10−3 %. This means approximately 4.6 out of 51,494 passengers who entered the restaurants would be infected by an infected passenger. Comparing with no surface disinfection, disinfecting public surfaces every 2 hours can reduce the risk of norovirus infection per visit to the airport by 83.2%. In contrast, comparing with no hand washing, handwashing every 2 hours can reduce the infection risk per visit to the airport by only 2.0%, making public surface disinfection significantly more effective than handwashing. If the mask-wearing rate increases from 0% to 50%, the infection risk of norovirus would be decreased by 48.0% Furthermore, using antimicrobial copper/copper-nickel alloy coatings for most public surfaces could reduce the infection risk by 15.9%-99.2%.

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Zhang N, Zhuang L, King MF, Qian H, Zhu M. Public surface disinfection every 2 hours can reduce the infection risk of norovirus in airports up to 83%. PLOS Computational Biology. 2024 Dec 5;20(12):e1012561.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11620375/pdf/pcbi.1012561.pdf