June 4, 2020

expert reaction to evaluation of post-lockdown social distancing strategies

A study, published in in Nature Human Behaviour, evaluated post-lockdown social distancing strategies.

Prof Linda Bauld, Professor of Public Health, University of Edinburgh, said:

“As some countries release lock down measures, advice to the public on what is permitted becomes increasingly complicated. Governments continue to talk about keeping us ‘safe’ from the virus. But anything short of completely isolating households is not completely safe. We need to recognise that lockdown release is about harm reduction, not complete safety. 

“This paper provides some alternatives for future harm reduction to contain the spread of Covid-19, while allowing people to interact more. It uses social network analysis, a well-established approach to measure and analyse how individuals and groups interact with each other and how behaviours or exposures are influenced by these networks. The paper proposes three approaches that would allow more contact between people as we move out of lock down.

“One of the most interesting elements of this research is that it directly addresses a key element of current public health advice in the UK. This is the ‘stay 2 meters away from anyone not in your household’ rule. For separated couples and single people, including our young people, this rule can be perceived as unfair and is unlikely to be followed in the long term. One approach supported by this research is the concept of a social bubble allowing individuals to have repeated close contact with a small group or ‘micro-community’. This would be appealing for couples who don’t live together, or as the researchers point out, a group of carers looking after vulnerable adults, or might even allow those in the shielded category to meet up. It was also the most effective strategy included in the research in terms of allowing more contact between individuals while slowing the spread of the virus. 

“This idea of forming social bubbles, as with the other two approaches set out in the paper, assumes that individuals will behave in a predictable way. It also assumes that people can maintain a consistent pattern of contacts over time. Yet human behaviour isn’t predictable and won’t necessarily mirror what the statistical models in this study predict. But the research describes new ways to balance the risks and benefits of different types contact with other people. It could be useful during the months ahead when Covid-19 will still be with us and will continue to pose a risk to health.”

 ‘Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the COVID-19 curve in a post-lockdown world’ by Block et al. was published in Nature Human Behaviour on Thursday 4^th June 2020.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0898-6

Declared interests

None received