key: cord-0042993-f0sc3vmp
authors: Williams, Nerys
title: Social Distancing in the Covid-19 Pandemic
date: 2020-05-02
journal: Occup Med (Lond)
DOI: 10.1093/occmed/kqaa072
sha: fdfc62c50d91b6c079c95383efec408b0ca6ab61
doc_id: 42993
cord_uid: f0sc3vmp

nan

A consistent feature of every national response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been the issuing of guidance to the public on social distancing. Also called safe distancing in Singapore, social distancing is a series of measures designed to prevent the transmission of the virus from human to human and is essentially a variety of means of physical separation. Key consistent features of public health advice across the world include staying indoors, working from home where possible and avoiding social gatherings.

Also consistent across national and international public health advice is the need to leave the house only for essential work, food shopping, caring for sick and vulnerable people and for medical treatment. When individuals leave the house, they are advised to keep a specific minimum distance from other people, but this is where some of the consistency of advice ends.

Different countries have different minimum distances which they advise their citizens to maintain. This varies from 1 m as advised by the World Health Organization (WHO), Singapore and Hong Kong, to 1.5 m in Australia. The USA advises 1.8 m (the equivalent of 6 feet) and the UK, Ireland and New Zealand favour 2 m. All governments state that their advice is based on the scientific evidence underpinning the control of pandemics. So how do different countries come up with different recommendations and do the public know what these distances actually look like?

In the case of a safe distance to avoid spread, recommendations originate from modelling, simulations and lessons learnt from outbreaks of other viruses. Recent work by Guo et al. suggests that maybe none of these distances is fully protective for Covid-19 with spread of up to 4 m reported in a hospital setting although it is not clear if particles travelling this far are infectious [1] .

Adhering to guidance on safe distancing does depend on the public both knowing the recommended distance and being able to accurately judge that distance when out of the house and then interpret it as greater or less than 2 m.

In addition to advising a safe distance of 2 m, guidance could more consistently add examples of what 2 m 'looks and feels like', e.g. three steps distance, half the length of a small car (Ford Fiesta size), a standard household room door or the length of a double bed. This may help the public to understand what they need to do in their everyday lives to stay clear and stay safe.

Nerys Williams e-mail: neryswilliams1443@gmail.com

Aerosol and surface distribution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in hospital wards