“Abstract
Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The available data from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food processing plants, hair stylists, and airlines show employers adopting mitigation protocols in the spring of 2020. Coincident with the adoption, infection rates in workplaces typically dropped from well above household rates to well below...
VI. Conclusions
... Micro evidence contradicts the public-health ideal in which households would be places of solitary confinement and zero transmission. Instead, the evidence suggests that ‘households show the highest transmission rates’ and that ‘households are high-risk settings for the transmission of [COVID-19].’ Schools, businesses, and other organizations implemented a range of prevention protocols – from adjusting airflow to installing physical barriers to monitoring compliance to administering their own testing services – that households did not, and perhaps could not. Something in these organizations greatly reduced the spread,"
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