Citation

Echeverría-Huarte I, Garcimartín A, Hidalgo RC, Martín-Gómez C, Zuriguel I. Sci. Rep. 2021; 11(1): e1534.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1038/s41598-020-79454-0

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

With people trying to keep a safe distance from others due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the way in which pedestrians walk has completely changed since the pandemic broke out(1,2). In this work, laboratory experiments demonstrate the effect of several variables-such as the pedestrian density, the walking speed and the prescribed safety distance-on the interpersonal distance established when people move within relatively dense crowds. Notably, we observe that the density should not be higher than 0.16 pedestrians per square meter (around 6 m(2) per pedestrian) in order to guarantee an interpersonal distance of 1 m. Although the extrapolation of our findings to other more realistic scenarios is not straightforward, they can be used as a first approach to establish density restrictions in urban and architectonic spaces based on scientific evidence.

Language: en