Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: Social Bubbles)

Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

Topic: Social Bubbles

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour suggests that one of the ways of effective social distancing strategies to keep the COVID-19 curve flat include the idea of social bubbles.
The idea of 'social bubbles' is based on New Zealand’s model of household 'bubbles' - an exclusive social group that is allowed to meet with each other amid the pandemic.

Researchers have revealed that social bubbles or small groups of close contacts made up of friends and family may be the best way to keep COVID-19 contained when a lockdown is lifted.
According to the study, lifting the lockdown in favour of strategic distancing, could lead to improved compliance with official recommendations and ‘keep the curve’ flat, in terms of COVID-19 infections.

The study introduces three strategies, which include contact with similar people, strengthening contact in communities and repeatedly interacting with the same people in bubbles. ( These strategies rely less on confinement and allow strategic social contact while still flattening the curve.
Each strategy offers the prospect of increased social contact, in a clearly defined way.
With regards to social bubbles, the study says that to create them individuals must decide with whom they want to regularly interact and overtime, they should restrict interactions to just these people. “This reduces the number of contact partners rather than the number of interactions.
Maintaining similarity across contacts, such as only interacting with people who live within the same neighbourhood, and decreasing ties as occasional acquaintances were found to be highly effective when compared to reducing contact at random.
Based on the findings, the authors suggest that reducing high-impact contact, rather than reducing or removing it overall, can mitigate adverse social, behavioural and economic impacts of lockdown approaches while keeping risks low.

As per New Zealand’s model, a bubble is referred to as an individual’s household or the people that one lives with.
Under Alert level 3, people are allowed to extend their bubbles slightly to include caregivers or children who might be in shared care.
It also applies to people who are living alone or a couple who wants the company of another one or two people. These people don’t need to live in the same household but must be local.
In case a member of the bubble develops symptoms, the entire bubble quarantines itself, preventing further spread of the infection.

Social bubbles can also be applied by employers to create departmental or work unit bubbles of employees. For instance, for hospitals and essential workers, the risk of transmission can be minimised by introducing shifts with a similar composition of employees. This could mean clubbing together employees based on their residential proximity.
The authors of the study maintain that these “micro-communities” are difficult for a virus to penetrate and if in case the infection is contracted by one contact, it would be difficult for the virus to spread much further.