University of Michigan faculty, staff, alumni and students have developed online tools designed to help local and state officials reopen the economy safely and gradually while allowing them to quickly identify and respond to potential coronavirus hot spots and outbreaks.
As states in the US slowly reopen their economies, industry and business leaders will need to think about worker safety in new ways, most importantly how to mitigate the spread of infectious disease while still maintaining other basic safety measures specific to their facility.
As the US slowly reopens the economy, a variety of new safety measures will be needed to ensure worker safety, from engineering and administrative interventions for entire facilities down to personal protective equipment. These measures are not meant to hinder economic recovery but rather to reduce the incidence and prevalence of infectious disease to protect American workers and their families.
Long before we could sequence a virus’s genome in a matter of weeks, we used public health tactics like contact tracing to sort out the movement of a disease in a population. Contact tracing is one of the “traditional” tools of epidemiologists. Today, we have more public health surveillance tools at our disposal, and we’ll need both the old and the new to bring COVID-19 under control.
We are all eager to get back to work, but how do we move forward in a way that safeguards the public’s health?
We’re all wondering when we can return to work, see friends and family, and get back to some sense of normal. Meanwhile, we might notice that a planned temporary hospital wasn’t built or that some data seems to show a reduction in the spread of coronavirus. What do we do with emerging shades of gray in a situation that seemed so black and white not too long ago?