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• Ventilation rate and arrangement are crucial to prevent airborne disease in healthcare facilities. • Local ventilation is practical for supply fresh air and diluting contaminants in high-risk areas. • Microplastics emerged as potential virus carriers in indoor environments, warrant further investigations. The prevalence and transmission of airborne infections pose significant challenges to public health, leading to consequential negative impacts. Ventilation strategies are crucial in mitigating airborne infections in healthcare settings, preventing the spread of infectious diseases, thus protecting patients and healthcare workers. While individual studies have explored various aspects of ventilation in healthcare settings, a synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge is lacking. Therefore, this study attempts to bridge the gap by conducting a review and bibliometric analysis based on 198 papers published within the recent decades (1993–2022). The findings will provide a holistic understanding on the innovative interventions and identify areas for future research, thereby contributing to the development of effective guidelines for controlling airborne infections. The co-authorship analysis revealed that China emerged as the main contributor in the current research field due to the keen interest of researchers and the substantial financial support provided by funding agencies. The keyword co-occurrence analysis identified three primary research hotspots within the field, (i) the optimized ventilation strategies for combating airborne infection, (ii) the transition towards the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in analyzing airflow patterns, and, (iii) the characteristics of airborne particles and their impact on infection transmission. The present review highlights the significance of local ventilation as an additional measure to the main ventilation system for enhanced dilution of contaminants in high-risk areas. The transition towards dynamic airflow analysis considered human movement's effect, allowing for more precise assessments and tailored ventilation strategies optimization. The review also underscores the emerging concern of microplastic as an indoor contaminant with potential implications as a virus carrier, emphasizing further research on its behavior and impact on airborne infection transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Investigating ventilation for precaution and control of COVID-19 in high-occupant-density public environments. • Balancing a low-infection-risk yet energy efficient ventilation control. • Developing a smart low-cost ventilation control strategy based on occupant-density-detection algorithm. • Providing a feasible and promising solution to fight against COVID-19. Ventilation plays an important role in prevention and control of COVID-19 in enclosed indoor environment and specially in high-occupant-density indoor environments (e.g., underground space buildings, conference room, etc.). Thus, higher ventilation rates are recommended to minimize the infection transmission probability, but this may result in higher energy consumption and cost. This paper proposes a smart low-cost ventilation control strategy based on occupant-density-detection algorithm with consideration of both infection prevention and energy efficiency. The ventilation rate can be automatically adjusted between the demand-controlled mode and anti-infection mode with a self-developed low-cost hardware prototype. YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithm was applied for occupancy detection based on video frames from surveillance cameras. Case studies show that, compared with a traditional ventilation mode (with 15% fixed fresh air ratio), the proposed ventilation control strategy can achieve 11.7% energy saving while lowering the infection probability to 2%. The developed ventilation control strategy provides a feasible and promising solution to prevent transmission of infection diseases (e.g., COVID-19) in public and private buildings, and also help to achieve a healthy yet sustainable indoor environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]