Planning for classroom physical distancing to minimize the threat of COVID-19 disease spread

Alan T Murray

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 12, 1-15

Abstract: The coronavirus disease 2019 is a respiratory illness spread between people. A primary weapon for reducing or eliminating this disease involves physical distancing to thwart transmission. Efforts to keep the economy moving include enacting physical distancing strategies that will increase the safety of workplaces, schools, businesses, etc. Given that education is a critical economic sector that impacts essentially all other sectors in some way, this paper details a planning approach for classroom physical distancing supported by spatial optimization. Devising a configuration of desks and/or workspaces that are physically distant is a type of dispersion problem that can be formalized mathematically and solved. Planning efforts for a university campus serve to illustrate how spatial optimization can support safety enhancements.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243345 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 43345&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0243345

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243345

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().