Page 9 - GIS for Science: GIS Response to COVID-19

REOPENING THE WORKPLACE WITH INDOOR MAPPING
Leaders of businesses and organizations large and small faced multiple, complex challenges and decisions in their desire to reopen. In the United States, the White House released guidelines for reopening workplaces in phases, and those guidelines evolved through the summer as virus infections spiked in many states.
The ArcGIS® platform helps those tasked with providing a safe environment while adjusting to the evolving guidelines. Employers with large workforces and complex campuses showed particular interest in how to reopen facilities in compliance with federal, state, and local guidelines without jeopardizing employee health or wellness. With potential vaccines still in clinical trials through the summer, social distancing requirements, for example, required a new normal in the workplace. Some employers had to rethink floor plans, especially if their businesses used an open floor plan. Other businesses designated new walking routes to minimize worker interactions and avoid contaminated areas. Communicating with the workforce also is crucial, especially if an employee is exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. And all employees can expect to know what spaces are off limits and understand the sanitation schedules for their job sites. With employees spread across more buildings in some cases, employers face the challenges of closing off areas of high contact and ensuring regular and ongoing sanitizing to lower, if not eliminate, the risk of infection.
One federal guideline instrumental to the well-being of employees and the successful recovery of their community has proved daunting: “develop and implement policies and procedures for workforce contact tracing following employee COVID+ test.” Tracing can be as simple as asking infected workers whom they came in contact with. Answering this question may be easy in a small business but might be a difficult task in a large company.
Tracking the movement of people outdoors relative to the virus has proven easier than contact tracing indoors. Even fewer technologies are capable of accurately
representing contact between two employees within the walls and floors of a building. Esri, for one, has developed location tracking dashboards to support businesses as their employees return to work.
Protecting the workforce
Employers understand that the health of workers, their families, and surrounding community is vital to the global recovery and success of their businesses. As the virus spread globally, the workforce included employees in one of three categories:
• Those who got sick from the virus
• Those who did not know they were infected because they had minor or no
symptoms (asymptomatic)
• Those who have not been infected
For this reason, COVID-19 prevention measures are essential at work so that employees can feel confident about their return until a vaccine is released.
Using a passive contact tracing solution provides employees with the peace of mind that interactions are monitored and that high-contact areas are routinely sanitized. Employers can see where traffic is greatest and can automate alerts to cleaning crews after a certain threshold has been reached. Maintenance crews can be monitored against cleaning goals to ensure that staffing levels are adequate to keep facilities clean.
With the ability to trace movement indoors and outdoors, public health and corporate security can meet their goals. This solution can scale to support thousands of employees across multiple sites to safely advance through each phase of recovery and enhance safety far into the future.
Understand proximity tracing
ArcGIS Indoors allows employers to deploy tracing apps for iOS and Android devices. With this capability, employers can provide tools for any device to aggregate workforce movements in real time and log contacts for historical analysis.
Performing spatial analysis on historical employee movement data enables employers to determine high traffic areas for sanitation and detect proximity among employees across space and time. If an infected employee gets past safeguards, the ability to quickly trace and identify their contacts can help quell the spread.
Dashboard showing intersecting location tracks.
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