Returning to the In-Person Workplace in a (Post?) Pandemic Context

Introduction

Connectivity in the world—such as “globalization, travel, and trade”—are accelerants of pandemics (Joseph, Angeline, & Arasu, 2020, p. 133), even as these practices have slowed based on travel bans against non-essential travel and biosafety measures have been emplaced. The pandemic disrupted various supply chains, but human needs for PPE and other goods mean business continuance in some fields (Chinniah, Taylor, & Proches, June 25, 2020, p. 2). Globally, the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pandemic has infected some 200 million people. This pandemic has cost close to four million deaths (and counting) from its start in late 2019. Many millions more are experiencing “long COVID” health effects, which may be permanent, with major effects on brains, hearts, and other organs. The current numbers are thought to be undercounts by potentially several orders of magnitude. Some estimate that actual counts would show well over 10% of the world’s population or 800 million as having been infected. Even as many questions remain about the origins of the pathogenic “severe acute respiratory syndrome – coronavirus 2” and “coronavirus disease 2019,” a traumatized world is slowly coming out of various lockdowns.

Social distancing at social scale has been found to be effective in lowering the spread of an airborne transmissible pathogen between people. Social distancing at societal scale refers to endeavors like “school closure, workplace non-attendance, increased case isolation, and community contact reduction” (Milne & Xie, Mar. 21, 2020, p. 1). Another proposal to lower the number of people in close proximity to each other is “hybrid telecommuting,” which seems to change up scheduling for people’s work. This method to limit contacts between people affect “real-life contact networks stemming from a workplace, a primary school and a high school” (Mauras, et al., 2020, p. 1) and so may disrupt potential viral transmission chains. Such endeavors, when modeled out, show some flattening of the epidemic curve and a lowering of the daily infection case numbers and lengthening the outbreak duration (to “buy time” for mitigations). These can be effective even under some conditions of uncertainty, such as in the early phases of an outbreak with a novel as-yet unknown pathogen.

One important observation is that “the original COVID-19 always keeps in a constant transform in different places and periods, respectively” based on constant mutations (Estrada, Feb. 2021, p. 1) and different instantiations among different populations. To acknowledge the changes, one researcher suggests renaming the COVID respiratory disease annually, such as “COVID-20,” “COVID-21,” to capture annual differences in “transmission, treatments, eradication, and vaccination” (Estrada, Feb. 2021, p. 1).

Such government lockdowns—set up to lower the number of proxemic human contacts—have not been socially costless. They have slowed economies, decimated various industries, prevented more effective schooling, led to various lack of attention to health, and other challenges. With the mass vaccination of populations in the U.S., however, reopenings are occurring at a rapid pace in the spring and summer of 2021. Governments are communicating a need to make up for lost time. The Work-from-Home (WFH or WfH) phenomenon in early days seemed to harness various practices that work (George & George, Apr. 2020, p. 269), based on some guidance from public health professionals. Now, it is about Return-to-Work (RtW). The changing workplace geographies may mean different things to different people based on their local contexts, which are unevenly distributed. Homeworking in the Global North differs from other locales (Reuschke & Felstead, 2020, pp. 208-209):