Opening your car windows could reduce your COVID-19 risk

By now, we all know the basic coronavirus rules. Wear a mask, limit your exposure to other people and when you can't, keep your distance, and ... keep wearing your mask. We also learned at the outset of the pandemic how to properly keep surfaces clean, including in your car. But what we haven't known is whether we should keep the windows up or down.

A new study from Brown University seeks to answer that question. Using complex computational fluid dynamic simulations, Varghese Mathai, Asimanshu Das, Jeffrey Bailey and Kenneth Breuer studied how the aerosols that we breath (some of which do escape even properly worn masks) move about a car's cabin and how those flows change with various windows up and down. The results are very interesting, but in short, you're probably going to want the windows rolled down when possible.