to think social distancing at work is a bit pointless

[chomalungma]

If it's an airborne disease, that spreads through the air, lasts on surfaces for a while etc.

You can have desks set apart - but the virus will still circulate. People will still touch surfaces, put their hands to their faces etc.

When people return to an office, the infection will spread, and no amount of separated desks is going to stop that. Not when people still circulate together in a busy office.

It's not airborne, it's spread through droplets (coughing, sneezing, etc).

People aren't going to go back to work and start touching cupboards and then touching their faces - we're all getting plenty of practice in how to behave when touching things in public and everyone will continue to do that when offices, etc re-open.

I would imagine people will have hand sanitiser and disinfectant wipes at their desks and will have to maintain social distancing rules. It's not going to be like it was before - people will just have to adapt, as they are now.

Everyone will have to learn how to practise good hand hygiene and obviously not attend work even if they just have cold symptoms. Whether or not people will bother is another story though.

Whilst I agree that even with social distancing you are not in a completely safe bubble you can absolutely take precautions at work, wiping down phone, not sharing pens etc. You can stagger starts, finishes and breaks and you can still have some people working from home.

As someone at work (in a hospital) I don’t think the 2m distancing is consistently possible as many corridors aren’t wide enough or rooms big enough and lifts are too small but every little thing you do to distance yourself will hopefully keep the infection rate low. The problems will come with complacency and not maintaining the things that we can do never mind the unattainable.

Separated desks cannot, and will not, be the only measure taken.

And not every workplace is an office.

For example, a car production line; people are probably working 2m apart from their colleagues anyway so the measures taken there would be masks sanitisers going into/out of zones/loos, eating areas rearranged etc.

It’s not airborne .

If someone has the disease, is asyptomatic, then they are going to spread it.

I think that having separated desks is a bit pointless - considering all the other ways people could catch it and the structure of some modern offices where people go near each other.

There are better ways of reducing transmission - such as altering work patterns, reducing the number of people in work etc Plus hand washing.

If they're asymptomatic they're not coughing or sneezing and will be filtering distancing measures.

*following not filtering

Doesn't it spread through the air if someone coughs or sneeze In Your direction without covering their mouth?

it's not airborne

I think there's some disagreement about that.

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w

Since early reports revealed that a new coronavirus was spreading rapidly between people, researchers have been trying to pin down whether it can travel through the air. Health officials say the virus is transported only through droplets that are coughed or sneezed out — either directly, or on objects. But some scientists say there is preliminary evidence that airborne transmission — in which the disease spreads in the much smaller particles from exhaled air, known as aerosols — is occurring, and that precautions, such as increasing ventilation indoors, should be recommended to reduce the risk of infection

Been working this whole time in a shared office hotdesking computers the works. No one has been ill yet. We wash our hands frequently, clean our desks, phones etc a lot, don't make drinks in "rounds" etc. You are being dramatic.

We don’t all work in an office!

No way can we do dentistry hairdressing spa Botox. nails Beauty chiropodist etc etc from 2m away
Plus these industries rely on customer turnover

Nice idea tho

There are so many things you can do besides the obvious... I take my own food / drink to work = no need to use communal areas except WC. I go for a walk at lunchtime or sit in my car. I have anti bac wipes and we have hand sanitizer at entrance areas. It's far from perfect but it has to do.

You are being dramatic

I don't think you understand the OP.

There is little point in social distancing at work with desks because the chances are that if someone is ill, then you are going to catch it. Putting the desks apart may help - but given how offices work, it's not really going to make much of a difference to getting infected.

I’m far more concerned about my commute on busy public transport than I am about the office.

Did you read the article you posted OP? It says that there is no evidence that the virus is airborne or transferred in microparticles.

“In the mind of scientists working on this, there’s absolutely no doubt that the virus spreads in the air,” says aerosol scientist Lidia Morawska at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “This is a no-brainer.

The assumption should be that airborne transmission is possible unless experimental evidence rules it out, not the other way around, says Tang. That way people can take precautions to protect themselves, he says.

Increasing ventilation indoors and not recirculating air can go some way to ensuring that infectious aerosols are diluted and flushed out, says Morawska. Indoor meetings should be banned just in case, she says.

If we're trying to keep transmission down until there is a treatment or vaccine then bringing back into offices the one set of workers who can WFH seems somewhat idiotic.

People who can WFH should continue, those who can't should be the priority for SD and safety measures.

Restarting the economy whilst suppressing transmission will need us to keep the people who can WFH off public transport and roads and out of shared spaces. It won't work if everyone tries to go back.

So your argument is that because we can’t eliminate risk we shouldn’t try to reduce it?

So your argument is that because we can’t eliminate risk we shouldn’t try to reduce it

I don't think that having desks 2m apart is going to really do much in the reduction of risk.

I can think of other things that are far better.

I think the air conditioning in office buildings will render all distancing useless. Even if 1 person is carrying the virus it might get circulated to everyone on that floor. I think this was already proven in one of the early European asymptomatic cases.

My understanding is that the main vector of transmission is droplet based. Surface based infection seems negligible. A good proportion of infection is pre-symptomatic, so you're looking a speech as much as sneezing and coughing. If someone is coughing, 2m won't be enough, but you have to hope they wouldn't be at work. For speech and normal breathing, 2m should be just about enough.