A COVID-19 Risk Assessment for the US Labor Force

Sammantha Maher; Alexandra E Hill; Peter Britton; Eli P Fenichel; Peter Daszak; Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio; Jude Bayham

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.13.20063776 doi: medRxiv preprint New York City (18). This is justified with COVID-19 confirmed case load being concentrated in particular localities in the United States, and as part of an effort to flatten the rate of increase of confirmed cases . However, we caution that efforts to contain the virus to urban and other hotspots may already have failed (e.g. Blaine County, Iowa), and therefore response efforts should now also consider the risk of disease severity in sectors of the population (2). This 5 requires a shift of focus to high-risk counties and industries. Failure to protect vulnerable workforces could lead to the breakdown of essential industries in these counties and cause avoidable deaths and hardship in their communities. It might also create further hotspots of viral transmission, allowing COVID-19 to resurge in cities as they manage a return-to-work strategy. . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.