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

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Aug 26;17(8):e1009264. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009264. eCollection 2021 Aug.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Basic Reproduction Number / statistics & numerical data
  • COVID-19 / epidemiology
  • COVID-19 / prevention & control*
  • COVID-19 / transmission
  • Computational Biology
  • Computer Simulation
  • Contact Tracing
  • Disease Outbreaks / prevention & control*
  • Education, Distance / methods
  • Education, Distance / statistics & numerical data
  • France / epidemiology
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological
  • Personnel Staffing and Scheduling / statistics & numerical data
  • Public Health
  • SARS-CoV-2*
  • Schools
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Teleworking* / statistics & numerical data
  • Time Factors
  • Workplace

Grants and funding

LO received funding from the Fondation de France (grant 106059) as part of the alliance framework “Tous unis contre le virus”, and the Université Paris-Saclay (AAP Covid-19 2020); C.M. received research funding from the “Fonds d’urgence MESRI Covid19”, https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/, and from the French National Research Agency (grant ANR-19-CE48-0016). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.