Evaluation of ventilation in Australian school classrooms using long-term indoor CO2 concentration measurements

School classrooms are often reported as having insufficient ventilation with elevated indoor CO2 concentrations. This paper reports on pre-pandemic field measurements of CO2 concentration levels conducted for an academic year in 10 classrooms from four primary and a secondary school in Victoria, Australia. Measured CO2 concentrations across the 10 classrooms which were operated with a mix of intermittent natural ventilation and air-conditioning for cooling or heating, on average ranged between 657 ppm and 2235 ppm during school hours with median over 1000 ppm in 70% of classrooms. All 10 classrooms in the study exceeded the Australian recommended limit of 850 ppm. Using average peak CO2 concentrations from year-long measurements, estimated ventilation rate (VR) of 4.08 Ls-1 per person show under-performing classrooms where 60% had VRs 35–40% lower than the 10-12 Ls−1 per person Australian recommendation. Estimated VR range of 1.24–2.07 Ls-1 per person using peak maximum CO2 levels were 19–30% lower than ASHRAE recommendation of 6.7 Ls-1 per person. These VRs translate to a range of air change rates on average between 0.52 and 0.88 h−1 ± 0.26–0.59, well below the 6.0 h−1 recommendation for good indoor ventilation by the World Health Organisation in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Characterisation of ventilation and indoor air quality in current Australian classroom stock is critical for the improvement of classroom design, induction on room operating practices, understanding of the school community on the relevance of building ventilation on school performance and health, and development of appropriate ventilation and indoor air quality guidelines for schools. © 2023 The Authors

Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior Prediction using Machine Learning Models

The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the electric vehicle (EV) industry. The lockdown restriction has resulted in a significant shift in the use of public charging infrastructures. This paper investigates the effects of COVID-19 on electric vehicle users' charging behavior before, after, and during COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, using the data from a public charging facility from the City of California. In this study, we performed data visualization using K-means and hierarchical clustering analysis. This work uses the vehicle's connection and disconnection time to identify common charging pattern identification and charging behavior where K-means clustering outperforms the hierarchical clustering for all three different scenarios modelled. In addition, prediction of collective charging session duration is achieved using Machine Learning Models, Random Forest and XgBoost. We achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.146 and 0.151 percent for XgBoost and Random Forest respectively. © 2022 IEEE.

Do we need Zoonoses Research in India? (Special issue on COVID-19.)

It is not only useful, but necessary, to understand the importance of zoonoses research in India. I do not know how many of the "scientists/biologists/administrators" think about zoonoses while planning investigations into diseases of unknown etiology. And, we also need to understand the total epidemiological chain and the natural cycle of the disease agent. Studies on many diseases have been left incomplete, as soon as the disease in humans subsides. There is no more emergency. We have to think of 20-50 years from now and imagine its utility. As long as there is animal-human interface in disease spread, especially when the animals are mammals, the tools of Zoonoses/field biology will have little or no alternatives.

The deadly corona virus (COVID-19)

On 7th March 2020, the ministry of health, Govt. of India, said that the number of highly contagious Coronavirus disease cases in India had risen to 34. In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) had described the outbreak of febrile respiratory illness of unknown etiology from Wuhan in China. Now named Covid-19, it has now spread to more than 90 countries. As on 7th March 2020, there were 101,923 confirmed cases and 3486 deaths from 94 countries, areas and territories. WHO has declared the outbreak as Public Health Emergency of International Concern? Italy has reported over 9000 infected cases, with 463 deaths as on 10th March 2019, next in enormity only to that of China.