How can we best organise on-site workplace and school attendance periods and remote work to slow the circulation of Sars-CoV-2? Is it better to separate classes? Bring your whole team in at the same time? Set this up on daily or weekly schedules? The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most countries to impose contact limitations in workplaces, universities and schools. Scientists from the CNRS, Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, ENS de Lyon and INRIA 1 , in collaboration with the Institut Pasteur and INSERM, have analysed the impact of two strategies, rotating and on-off strategies 2 , in stopping the epidemic as it reaches a community, whether in a school or in an office. Their results show that below a certain local reproduction number threshold 3 in the community, the two strategies, combined with other health measures, effectively control the epidemic, although the ‘Rotating week-by-week’ strategy is the most effective of those studied. These results, published on 26 August 2021 in PLOS Computational Biology , offer new elements to guide public health decisions related to distance working, office or school.
Notes:
1 The French laboratories involved are at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale (CNRS/Université de Paris), LIP6 (CNRS/Sorbonne Université), GIPSA-Lab (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes), Département d ’ Informatique de l ’ ENS de Lyon, Centre de Recherche en Epidémiologie et Santé des Populations (INSERM/Université Paris-Saclay/UVSQ), Laboratoire Epidémiologie et Modélisation de la Résistance aux Antimicrobiens (Institut Pasteur/INSERM/UVSQ).
2 Rotation is intended to maintain a continuous presence in the workplace, while on-off is intended to maintain community cohesion. For example, for a school, in both cases an individual will only go to school one day in two or one week in two, but as part of a rotation strategy, the community is split in two: Cohort A goes to school while Cohort B stays at home, and vice versa; in an on-off strategy, everyone goes to school at the same time or stays at home at the same time.
3 The local reproduction number , or “local R0,” indicates the average number of new cases of a disease that a single infected and contagious person will generate in the community, on average, in a population without any immunity.
PLOS Computational Biology