The city-wide full-scale interactive application of sewage surveillance programme for assisting real-time COVID-19 pandemic control - A case study in Hong Kong.

The paper discusses the implementation of Hong Kong's tailor-made sewage surveillance programme led by the Government, which has demonstrated how an efficient and well-organized sewage surveillance system can complement conventional epidemiological surveillance to facilitate the planning of intervention strategies and actions for combating COVID-19 pandemic in real-time. This included the setting up of a comprehensive sewerage network-based SARS-CoV-2 virus surveillance programme with 154 stationary sites covering 6 million people (or 80 % of the total population), and employing an intensive monitoring programme to take samples from each stationary site every 2 days. From 1 January to 22 May 2022, the daily confirmed case count started with 17 cases per day on 1 January to a maximum of 76,991 cases on 3 March and dropped to 237 cases on 22 May.

A modeling investigation of the impact of street and building configurations on personal air pollutant exposure in isolated deep urban canyons.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of different configurations for two building design elements, namely building permeability and setback, proposed for mitigating air pollutant exposure problems in isolated deep canyons by using an indirect exposure approach. The indirect approach predicted the exposures of three different population subgroups (i.e.

Study of the PM₁₀ concentration variations along two intra-urban roads within a compact city.

Eighty-five measurement campaigns were performed repeatedly to compare the concentration variation profiles along two intra-urban roads-one with open configuration and the other with street canyon effect. Fixed-effects panel data analysis was applied for formulating a model to express the PM(10) concentrations along intra-urban roads in terms of parameters like nearby central monitoring data, traffic counts and meteorological conditions with an objective to analyze the PM(10) concentration variation patterns along the two roads. Our findings reveal that traffic intensity and metrological conditions exert influence on concentration variation for both types of road configurations while wind velocity only affect the pollutants removal effectiveness of open road configuration.