Working from home is more effective than keeping kids off school in tackling Covid - new study

Closing schools and shielding the over 60s has less of an effect in reducing Covid-19 transmissions and death rates than reducing workplace interactions A 30% reduction in workplace interactions is forecasted to result in a 62% reduction in new infections and a 54% reduction in new deaths by the end of 2020 compared with no additional interventions - Enabling employees to work from home is more effective than keeping children off school, or shielding the over 60s in reducing new Covid infections, new deaths and total deaths. That's the finding from new research by two University of Sussex mathematicians. Dr Konstantin Blyuss and Dr Yuliya Kyrychko were given access to official Covid data from Ukraine, which they used to model four scenarios: reducing school interactions by 30%; reducing workplace interactions by 30%; shielding half of the over 60s population; and no interventions at all. The Sussex team worked with Dr Igor Brovchenko from the Institute of Mathematical Machine and System Problems in Kyiv, on behalf of the working group of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine - the Ukraine's equivalent of the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies. The authors believe their findings are applicable to any country in the world, and back up previous research. The team found that reducing school contacts by 30% was more effective at both reducing new infections and new deaths than shielding the over 60s. This may be because children and young people naturally tend to interact with more people than older people.