The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care recently encouraged people to go back to their work places instead of working from home. The safety of this is disputed. Professor Martin Michaelis and Dr Mark Wass of University of Kent’s School of Biosciences explain, saying:
‘Matt Hancock suggests that there was “little evidence” of coronavirus transmission in offices. He told the BBC: “The reason is the evidence from NHS Test and Trace for where people catch the disease is that very largely they catch it from one household meeting another household, usually in one of their homes. So it is that household transmission that is the core root of passing on this virus in this country. The amount of people who have caught it in workplaces is relatively low, from the evidence we’ve got.”
‘This is a simplistic view, failing to consider that offices have been largely closed during the lockdown and most people worked from home if they could. We will only learn about virus transmission in offices, when people return to them.
‘Considering the known transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, offices are places at high risk of virus transmission, in particular if no preventive measures are taken.
‘SARS-CoV-2 is spread via the air and via contaminated surfaces. The risk of infection is strongly increased in closed rooms because the virus concentration increases over time, in particular if there is no effective ventilation. Dry (office) air has recently been shown to further increase the infection risk. Hence, a humidity of at least 40% is recommended.
‘Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted via shared equipment, which makes hot-desking a significant concern. Every item touched by many (e.g. door handles, coffee machines, photocopiers) is an immediate infection risk.
‘Notably, one of the most prominent cases of virus transmission occurred at the work place. A visitor from China, who did not display symptoms at the time, infected four members of a German company. Only two individuals were directly infected by the visitor, one of which went on two infect two further employees. The transmission chain was stopped when the visitor had returned to China and reported symptoms by contact tracing and isolation. This illustrates how quickly asymptomatic transmission can result in a substantial disease outbreak in an office, in the absence of strict control measures.
‘The safe return to offices depends on thorough prevention measures. This includes hygiene concepts that prevent virus spread via contaminated equipment and surfaces, distancing measures that prevent virus transmission through the air, routine testing and effective contact tracing systems. Failure to install these measures proficiently and for the long term, is to risk resurgence of a virus that is still entirely present in our society.’
Professor Martin Michaelis and Dr Mark Wass, School of Biosciences, University of Kent
Professor Michaelis and Dr Wass run a joint computational/ wet laboratory. Dr Wass is a computational biologist with expertise in structural biology and big data analysis. Prof Michaelis’ research is focused on the identification and investigation of drugs and their mechanisms of action, with a focus on cancer and viruses. With regard to viruses, Prof Michaelis and Dr Wass work on virus-host cell interactions and antiviral drug targets. In the cancer field, they investigate drug resistance in cancer. In collaboration with Professor Jindrich Cinatl (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main), they manage and develop the Resistant Cancer Cell Line (RCCL) Collection, a unique collection of 2,000 cancer cell lines with acquired resistance to anti-cancer drugs. They are also interested in meta-research that investigates research practices in the life sciences.
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