Seeks to establish social contours - a set of activities and interactions you can undertake without the risk of causing a new outbreak. during the current pandemic.
Team: Jessica Pidoux, Maurizio Arsenia, Miles Fahlman, Stephane Hess, Alexis Eischen, Tim Lee, Winfried Tilanus, Victor Salvia Punsoda, Remi Petitpierre, Judith Herzog, Paul-Olivier Dehaye (Mentor)
The Social Contouring project seeks to establish social contours during the current pandemic. The idea is to return to a normal life as much as possible while keeping the virus in check. So we developed a methodology to find social interactions we can safely undertake (and propose to call it ) social contours.
A social contour is people and places, a set of activities or social interactions you can undertake without the risk of causing a new outbreak.
There are many empty social places that could host safe economic activity and social interactions during the current work from home, shelter in place lock down. Social contours include safe people and safe places, social contours will reallow for reintegration of safe thriving communities and reignite economies.
Approach To tackle this we need a multi-level and hybrid approach in contrast to digital or biomedical responses currently being developed.
The three levels are: Macro level: social lifestyles Meso level: historical granular data about social interactions Micro level: factors putting people at risk according to the virus characteristics
The approach is anthropological, virology, and digital. The goal is maximizing social interactions within the virological boundaries. This would require fine-grain data while protecting privacy and providing a proportional public and political response.
This approach is NOT about mapping where the virus HAS BEEN, those approaches may increase our understanding of the virus dynamics which is very important but insufficient because they are not able to keep the virus in check.
Our approach maps how the virus CAN MOVE through a SPECIFIC SOCIETY by studying the structures of that society. That knowledge makes it possible to identify what MINIMAL PROTECTIVE measures are needed to keep the spread of the virus under control (R0 < 1) while disturbing that specific society as little as possible.
Both the community based approach study on Ebola (Wong et al., 2016) / Alexander et al.,2015) and the China vs Italy study (Wilder et al., 2020) show that R0 can be reduced to less than 1 with incomplete but well-placed measures. The main goal, formulated in such a way that it doesn't bash explicitly many other groups is to find out: "how to reduce R0 to less then 1 in a specific society".
