A Swiss cheese approach to pandemic safety

FRANCE-SWITZERLAND-CHEESE-EMMENTAL-SCIENCE-FEATURE Photo credit should read CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images

Lately, I’ve been thinking about pandemic safety and Swiss cheese. It’s an uninspiring cheese, but it’s a good visual metaphor for a layered approach to infection control.

This ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ has been around since at least the 1990’s, when it was proposed as a way of thinking about how accidents happen. During the pandemic, it’s been pressed into a different kind of service, used to visualize disease prevention instead of accidents.

In a pandemic as widespread as this one, no single action can keep a person from getting sick. There will always be flaws (holes) in any approach. Washing your hands won’t keep you from breathing in the virus — and wearing a cloth mask won’t completely protect you if you’re stuck in a stuffy room with...

Continue reading…



from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/34HaLzY

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

LG’s ‘first gaming laptop’ has an RTX 3080 and 11th Gen Intel CPU

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC v2020.009.20074

Apple TV Plus will begin streaming Friday Night Baseball on April 8th