Monitoring Social Distancing With Real-Time Detection and Tracking

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the world with dire consequences to the global healthcare system. It is urgent to control the spread of the disease, and reduce its negative impacts. Developing medications and vaccines is the most effective way to limit the speed of infection, confirmed by epidemiological studies in Chapter 2. Despite the efficiency of pharmaceutical solutions, no appropriate cure or available treatment has been developed until the last quarter of 2020. While medical research scientists keep working on producing effective medications for the new coronavirus, before October, no antiviral drug has been approved for use in the treatment of COVID-19 requiring hospitalization. Veklury is the first anti-COVID treatment approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, FDA also declares that it does not include the entire population (FDA, 2020). Despite an ongoing research on the vaccine development, no certain vaccine has been reported as of November when Pfizer and BioNTech announced their vaccine against COVID-19 has been achieved a success in the Phase 3 clinical trial (Pfizer, 2020). Given such harsh conditions from March to November, non-pharmaceutical measures, such as stay-at-home orders and social distancing regulations, have been executed as an alternative way to reduce the spread of COVID-19. However, the stay-at-home policy, as concluded in Chapter 4, has been determined as a failure because of an unexpected movement pattern in the United States, thereby, it is more crucial to monitor the social distancing in the public.

Practicing social distancing is one of the most effective precautions to prevent the spread of an infectious disease. It has been referred by the majority of the global communities since the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of practicing social distancing is to minimize the proximity of individuals physical contacts in crowded spaces, thus reducing the accumulative infection risk. Initially, the coronavirus is believed to be transmittable through the air only if people sneeze or cough, however, the World Health Organization (WHO) denies this inference in July 2020, and further announces that the new coronavirus can be spread by tiny particles suspended in the air after individuals talk or even breathe in crowded, closed, or poorly ventilated environments (WHO, 2020). Medical research has confirmed that people with mild or even no symptoms can also carry the novel virus, which implies that it is essential for the entire population to practice social distancing (Kim et al., 2020). Suggested by the epidemiologists, individuals must maintain at least 6 feet as a minimum distance between each other during a pandemic (Olsen et al., 2003). As one of the non-pharmacological preventions, practicing social distancing has been proved to be effective and necessary for controlling the transmission of contagious virus, including SARS, H1N1, and COVID-19 (Ferguson et al., 2006; Thu et al., 2020). The objective of practicing social distancing is to reduce transmission rate, thereby flattening the Gaussian curve and spreading cases over a longer time to relieve pressure on the health care capacity (Fong et al., 2020). A sharp spike of cumulative cases will happen without social distancing, and consequently, will lead to a disease control failure with an exponential growth of the death number.