Coronavirus; Putting the Country Back to Work

Key Take Away:
Attendees will learn the risks associated with reopening businesses in the aftermath of COVID-19, along with the availability of non-pharmaceutical interventions to improve safety for employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Adaptations to the epidemic through work-from-home and distance education have meanwhile opened the door for enormous financial savings through reduced use of brick-and-mortar structures, and their associated costs.

Overview:
The United States must go back to work to avoid lasting economic damage from the coronavirus shutdown. Failure to take sensible precautions could however repeat the mistakes of 1918, when premature relaxation of countermeasures resulted in unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations.

There are fortunately off-the-shelf non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that can reduce opportunities for contagion, along with administrative controls such as staggered work shifts and meal breaks that reduce the number of people present at any given time. Respiratory protection offers yet another line of defense should COVID-19 ever return in its current form, or a mutated one against which the vaccines under development will not work.

Areas Covered in the Session:

• The United States cannot shut down its economy indefinitely to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but premature relaxation of precautions will lead to unnecessary deaths as shown by similar events during the 1918 flu pandemic.
• Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing and face masks worked against the 1918 flu but the disease returned when people dropped their guard.
• NPIs also worked against the 1956-1957 flu and have also, in conjunction with the annual vaccine, apparently ended the 2019-2020 flu season a good month early.