A 3-day lag between infection and spread of COVID-19 could help us get back to work safely, according to one model.
Three Israeli professors have come up with a plan that could get the world back to work without causing a resurgence of COVID-19 infections. Uri Alon, Ron Milo, and Eran Yashiv suggest that we simply need to exploit a key weak spot of the coronavirus.
Turns out there is a 3-day delay, on average, between the time a person is infected with COVID-19 and the time he or she can infect others, the three professors write in The New York Times.
We can take advantage of this delay by having people go back to work in 2-week cycles that have them on the job for 4 days at a time, followed by a 10-day lockdown at home. Even if workers became infected during their 4-day work period, they would be heading into their scheduled 10-day lockdown before they could infect others.
“Models we created at the Weizmann Institute in Israel predict that this 2-week cycle can reduce the virus’s reproduction number—the average number of people infected by each infected person—below one,” they write. “So, a 10-4 cycle could suppress the epidemic while allowing sustainable economic activity.”
The strategy has an added benefit: It reduces the density of people at work and school, thus curtailing the transmission of the virus, the authors conclude.
Here’s how the 10-4 cycle might work:
- Schools could have students attend for 4 consecutive days every 2 weeks, in 2 alternating groups, and use distance-learning methods on the other school days.
- Children would go to school on the same days as their parents go to work.
- Businesses would work almost continuously, alternating between 2 groups of workers.
“The coronavirus epidemic is a formidable foe, but it is not unbeatable,” the authors conclude. “By scheduling our activities intelligently, in a way that accounts for the virus’s intrinsic dynamics, we can defeat it more rapidly, and accelerate a full return to work, school, and other activities.”