Documents safe distances 10 results

"Social distancing and stay-at-home orders were implemented as a quick response to the public health crisis created by COVID-19. However, these measures led to competing concerns for public health versus the wellbeing of the economy during the pandemic. This drove polarized views and attitudes towards these measures in the US that threatened their effectiveness in controlling the spread of infections. Our study addresses this point by investigating uptake of messaging treatments that highlight the health risks of COVID-19. We also investigate how priming economic risk of COVID-19 affects responsiveness to the health information messaging. A sample of 1200 US respondents were randomly assigned to a control and four messaging treatments that included information about risks of COVID-19 on own health, public health, the economy, and combination of public health and the economy, respectively. Our results indicate a significant difference in messaging uptake based on political partisanship. Individuals identifying as Democrats increased their social distancing and stay-at-home decisions in response to all information treatments, contrary to Republicans who showed no significant change in their behavior. Using a latent class analysis model, we classify individuals into three main types (dismissive, amenable, and conscious) that differ in their perceptions of the risks associated with COVID-19. We show that only amenable individuals, who account for approximately 34% of the sample, respond significantly to the messaging treatments."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has become a public health priority during 2020. Social safety distance is one of the most effective strategies to stop the spreading of the virus, as it reduces the dose of infectious particles that a person can receive. Real-time location systems (RTLS) based on ultrawideband (UWB), radio frequency identification (RFID), Global Position System (GPS), or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) can help keep workers safe at the workplace. The aim of the current paper is to develop a dosimeter proposal to monitor and control the distance and exposure time between workers based on BLE beacon technology considering viral load. Our proposal is based on a set of BLE beacons and safety distance estimation by filtering RSSI measurements with a Gaussian extended Kalman filter. According to the estimated proximity values and the exposure time, a finite state machine will alarm when the worker receives the maximum dose defined by health authorities. The proposed system can be applied to prevent any risk that can be eliminated or reduced controlling distances and/or exposition time of the worker to the occupational risk. The proposal is robust, is inexpensive, and respects the privacy of workers, and its accuracy is higher than that of existing smartphone applications. In future pandemic situations, the system can be easily updated to the safety distance and viral particle dose related with the new risk agent. The system can protect from additional risk incorporating beacons on the extra risk identified such as thermal, noise, or radiation."