Mitigating COVID-19 outbreaks in workplaces and schools by hybrid telecommuting.

Autor: Simon Mauras, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Guillaume Duboc, Max Dupré la Tour, Paolo Frasca, Claire Mathieu, Lulla Opatowski, Laurent Viennot
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS Computational Biology, Vol 17, Iss 8, p e1009264 (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1553-734X
1553-7358
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009264
Popis: The COVID-19 epidemic has forced most countries to impose contact-limiting restrictions at workplaces, universities, schools, and more broadly in our societies. Yet, the effectiveness of these unprecedented interventions in containing the virus spread remain largely unquantified. Here, we develop a simulation study to analyze COVID-19 outbreaks on three real-life contact networks stemming from a workplace, a primary school and a high school in France. Our study provides a fine-grained analysis of the impact of contact-limiting strategies at workplaces, schools and high schools, including: (1) Rotating strategies, in which workers are evenly split into two shifts that alternate on a daily or weekly basis; and (2) On-Off strategies, where the whole group alternates periods of normal work interactions with complete telecommuting. We model epidemics spread in these different setups using a stochastic discrete-time agent-based transmission model that includes the coronavirus most salient features: super-spreaders, infectious asymptomatic individuals, and pre-symptomatic infectious periods. Our study yields clear results: the ranking of the strategies, based on their ability to mitigate epidemic propagation in the network from a first index case, is the same for all network topologies (workplace, primary school and high school). Namely, from best to worst: Rotating week-by-week, Rotating day-by-day, On-Off week-by-week, and On-Off day-by-day. Moreover, our results show that below a certain threshold for the original local reproduction number [Formula: see text] within the network (< 1.52 for primary schools, < 1.30 for the workplace, < 1.38 for the high school, and < 1.55 for the random graph), all four strategies efficiently control outbreak by decreasing effective local reproduction number to [Formula: see text] < 1. These results can provide guidance for public health decisions related to telecommuting.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals
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