Cocooning is essential to relaxing social distancing.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wang X
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7273277 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Cocooning is essential to relaxing social distancing.
Wang Xutong X Du Zhanwei Z Huang George G Pasco Remy F RF Fox Spencer J SJ Galvani Alison P AP Pignone Michael M Johnston S Claiborne SC Meyers Lauren Ancel LA
medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences 20200508
As the first wave of COVID-19 recedes, policymakers are contemplating the relaxation of shelter-in-place orders. Using a model capturing high-risk populations and transmission rates estimated from hospitalization data, we find that postponing relaxation will only delay a second wave and cocooning vulnerable populations is needed to prevent overwhelming medical surges. ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:As coronavirus disease spreads throughout the United States, policymakers are contemplating reinstatement and relaxation of shelter-in-place orders. By using a model capturing high-risk populations and transmission rates estimated from hospitalization data, we found that postponing relaxation will only delay future disease waves. Cocooning vulnerable populations can prevent overwhelming medical surges.
| S-EPMC7706923 | biostudies-literature
Project description:New emerging infectious diseases are identified every year, a subset of which become global pandemics like COVID-19. In the case of COVID-19, many governments have responded to the ongoing pandemic by imposing social policies that restrict contacts outside of the home, resulting in a large fraction of the workforce either working from home or not working. To ensure essential services, however, a substantial number of workers are not subject to these limitations, and maintain many of their pre-intervention contacts. To explore how contacts among such "essential" workers, and between essential workers and the rest of the population, impact disease risk and the effectiveness of pandemic control, we evaluated several mathematical models of essential worker contacts within a standard epidemiology framework. The models were designed to correspond to key characteristics of cashiers, factory employees, and healthcare workers. We find in all three models that essential workers are at substantially elevated risk of infection compared to the rest of the population, as has been documented, and that increasing the numbers of essential workers necessitates the imposition of more stringent controls on contacts among the rest of the population to manage the pandemic. Importantly, however, different archetypes of essential workers differ in both their individual probability of infection and impact on the broader pandemic dynamics, highlighting the need to understand and target intervention for the specific risks faced by different groups of essential workers. These findings, especially in light of the massive human costs of the current COVID-19 pandemic, indicate that contingency plans for future epidemics should account for the impacts of essential workers on disease spread.
| S-EPMC8336873 | biostudies-literature
Project description:More than a quarter of working-age households in the United States do not have sufficient savings to cover their expenditures after a month of unemployment. Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits to finance their consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic. We empirically analyze their impact. Relying on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we build a measure of households' expected time to cash shortfall based on the incidence of COVID-induced unemployment. We show that access to 1% of future benefits allows 75% of households to maintain their current consumption for three months in case of unemployment. We then compare the efficacy of access to Social Security benefits to already legislated approaches, including early access to retirement accounts, stimulus relief checks, and expanded unemployment insurance.
| S-EPMC7416733 | biostudies-literature
Project description:COVID-19 vaccines have been authorized in multiple countries, and more are under rapid development. Careful design of a vaccine prioritization strategy across sociodemographic groups is a crucial public policy challenge given that 1) vaccine supply will be constrained for the first several months of the vaccination campaign, 2) there are stark differences in transmission and severity of impacts from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) across groups, and 3) SARS-CoV-2 differs markedly from previous pandemic viruses. We assess the optimal allocation of a limited vaccine supply in the United States across groups differentiated by age and essential worker status, which constrains opportunities for social distancing. We model transmission dynamics using a compartmental model parameterized to capture current understanding of the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19, including key sources of group heterogeneity (susceptibility, severity, and contact rates). We investigate three alternative policy objectives (minimizing infections, years of life lost, or deaths) and model a dynamic strategy that evolves with the population epidemiological status. We find that this temporal flexibility contributes substantially to public health goals. Older essential workers are typically targeted first. However, depending on the objective, younger essential workers are prioritized to control spread or seniors to directly control mortality. When the objective is minimizing deaths, relative to an untargeted approach, prioritization averts deaths on a range between 20,000 (when nonpharmaceutical interventions are strong) and 300,000 (when these interventions are weak). We illustrate how optimal prioritization is sensitive to several factors, most notably, vaccine effectiveness and supply, rate of transmission, and the magnitude of initial infections.
| S-EPMC8072365 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This article describes patterns of compliance with social distancing measures among the Spanish population during the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It identifies several factors associated with higher or lower compliance with recommended measures of social distancing. This research is part of a 67-country study, titled the International COVID-19 study on Social & Moral Psychology, in which we use a Spanish dataset. Participants were residents in Spain aged 18 or above. The sample comprises 1,090 respondents, weighted to be representative of the Spanish population. Frequencies, correlations, bivariate analysis, and six models based on hierarchical multiple regressions were applied. The main finding is that most Spaniards are compliant with established guidelines of social distance during the pandemic (State of Alarm, before May 2020). Variables associated more with lower levels of compliance with these standards were explored. Six hierarchical multiple regression models found that compliance with social distance measures has a multifactorial explanation (R 2 between 20.4 and 49.1%). Sociodemographic factors, personal hygiene patterns, and the interaction between personal hygiene patterns and the support for political measures related to the coronavirus brought significant effects on the regression models. Less compliance was also associated with beliefs in some specific conspiracy theories with regard to COVID-19 or general conspiracy mentality (Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, CMQ), consumption patterns of traditional mass media (television, paper newspapers, magazines, and radio) and modern means to get informed (online digital newspapers, blogs, and social networks), political ideology, vote, trust in institutions, and political identification. Among the future lines of action in preventing the possible outbreak of the virus, we suggest measures to reinforce trust in official information, mainly linked to reducing the influence of disinformation and conspiracy theories parallel to the pandemic.
| S-EPMC8476756 | biostudies-literature
Project description:As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, new technologies are being leveraged to enforce social distancing requirements. I explore social distancing through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, with an emphasis on recognizing unauthorized movement and controlling circulation. Although reporting and widely shared data visualizations about COVID-19 have made many people newly aware that their movements are being tracked and surveilled, governments are already implementing new measures such as geofencing and artificial intelligence (AI)–based facial recognition to facilitate the enforcement of social distancing. The tracking of COVID-19 spread and social distancing behaviors of the public has made more visible the practices of biopolitics but also generated new opportunities for even greater surveillance and control. The current moment offers an opportunity to shift public perceptions about data surveillance, technological control, and the racial disparities of biopower, much in the same way that public perceptions around social media shifted during and after the Arab Spring. How we collectively respond to these biopolitical processes will, in part, determine how such power relations are articulated in the future.
| S-EPMC7417960 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We find that social distancing is affected by the policies set in neighboring counties, even after controlling for confirmed COVID cases and weather. A stay-at-home order in a neighboring county reduces social distancing by more than half as much as implementing an order in that county. This implies that, to increase social distancing in hard-hit counties, stay-at-home orders need to be implemented in a regionally or federally coordinated response. We also find that estimates of the efficacy of stay-at-home orders that do not control for policies in neighboring counties overstate the effect of these orders by about 50%.
| S-EPMC7462637 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC7878170 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social distancing interventions can be effective against epidemics but are potentially detrimental for the economy. Businesses that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or close physical proximity when producing a product or providing a service are particularly vulnerable. There is, however, no systematic evidence about the role of human interactions across different lines of business and about which will be the most limited by social distancing. Here we provide theory-based measures of the reliance of U.S. businesses on human interaction, detailed by industry and geographic location. We find that, before the pandemic hit, 43 million workers worked in occupations that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or require close physical proximity to other workers. Many of these workers lost their jobs since. Consistently with our model, employment losses have been largest in sectors that rely heavily on customer contact and where these contacts dropped the most: retail, hotels and restaurants, arts and entertainment and schools. Our results can help quantify the economic costs of social distancing.
| S-EPMC7500649 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundImplementing and lifting social distancing (LSD) is an urgent global issue during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when the travel ban is lifted to revive international businesses and economies. However, when and whether LSD can be considered is subject to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the recovery rate, and the case-fatality rate. It is imperative to provide real-time assessment of three factors to guide LSD.ObjectiveA simple LSD index was developed for health decision makers to do real-time assessment of COVID-19 at the global, country, region, and community level.MethodsData on the retrospective cohort of 186 countries with three factors were retrieved from a publicly available repository from January to early July. A simple index for guiding LSD was measured by the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases and recoveries, and the case-fatality rate was envisaged. If the LSD index was less than 1, LSD can be considered. The dynamic changes of the COVID-19 pandemic were evaluated to assess whether and when health decision makers allowed for LSD and when to reimplement social distancing after resurgences of the epidemic.ResultsAfter large-scale outbreaks in a few countries before mid-March (prepandemic phase), the global weekly LSD index peaked at 4.27 in March and lasted until mid-June (pandemic phase), during which most countries were affected and needed to take various social distancing measures. Since, the value of LSD has gradually declined to 0.99 on July 5 (postpandemic phase), at which 64.7% (120/186) of countries and regions had an LSD<1 with the decile between 0 and 1 to refine risk stratification by countries. The LSD index decreased to 1 in about 115 days. In addition, we present the results of dynamic changes of the LSD index for the world and for each country and region with different time windows from January to July 5. The results of the LSD index on the resurgence of the COVID-19 epidemic in certain regions and validation by other emerging infectious diseases are presented.ConclusionsThis simple LSD index provides a quantitative assessment of whether and when to ease or implement social distancing to provide advice for health decision makers and travelers.
| S-EPMC7505695 | biostudies-literature