Social Distancing is a Key Tactic to face COVID-19 Risk and to help organizations mitigate risks for employees and customers

Gartner Report

World Health Organization (WHO) officials early on stressed the importance for countries to test, isolate and trace new cases to suppress the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. As the world is currently facing the second wave of the pandemic, suppressing the spread of the virus is an especially key challenge during the transition out of confinement-and-outbreak phases, for all businesses and services.

The COVID-19 crisis also reveals that personnel are both the most important and most vulnerable assets of companies, industries and public-service and government agencies. Private and public-sector entities are torn between the imperative to strictly ensure the safety of their personnel and their critical challenge to maintain business and service continuity.

It is thus imperative to make it as convenient as possible for workforces to respect social distancing and, at the same time, to ensure appropriate anonymous monitoring to trace infected peoples’ interactions to prevent further contagion.

In its Manage Social Distancing and Contact Tracing with Location-Aware Technologies and Devices¹ report, Gartner describes “social distancing technologies” as solutions able to “reliably detect every proximity event, warn the user in real time, and record the event in a central system while providing total privacy and security”.

Gartner’s report talks about multiple technologies that can be used for this purpose, like Bluetooth proximity detection, and further recommends that decision-makers select the “best class of social distancing solution by matching its technical characteristics against the identity and behavior of the individuals to be tracked, the premises to be covered, local regulations, and the acceptable investment”.

In this report, you will learn:

    – What the four main types of relevant proximity-measurement technologies are,

    – Which social distancing technology could best match your organization,

    – What the flaws and challenges raised by contact tracing solutions are,

    – How to anticipate and fix them for a quick and successful implementation.

¹ Gartner “Manage Social Distancing and Contact Tracing with Location-Aware Technologies and Devices”, 11 June 2020, Nick Jones & Annette Zimmermann.

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