A Swiss cheese approach to pandemic safety

FRANCE-SWITZERLAND-CHEESE-EMMENTAL-SCIENCE-FEATURE Photo credit should read CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images

Lately, I’ve been thinking about pandemic safety and Swiss cheese. It’s an uninspiring cheese, but it’s a good visual metaphor for a layered approach to infection control.

This ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ has been around since at least the 1990’s, when it was proposed as a way of thinking about how accidents happen. During the pandemic, it’s been pressed into a different kind of service, used to visualize disease prevention instead of accidents.

In a pandemic as widespread as this one, no single action can keep a person from getting sick. There will always be flaws (holes) in any approach. Washing your hands won’t keep you from breathing in the virus — and wearing a cloth mask won’t completely protect you if you’re stuck in a stuffy room with...

Continue reading…

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Minneapolis hiring social media influencers for former police officers’ trials

Best Navigation Drawer Libraries for Android Project

To our fellow newsrooms: stop surrendering to online attacks on your reporters