Household Bubbling Strategies for Epidemic Control and Social Connectivity

TL;DR

This study models household merging strategies based on the number of working members to balance epidemic control with social connectivity, showing that worker-based merging can expand social bubbles while maintaining manageable epidemic risk.

Contribution

It introduces a novel household merging strategy based on economic activity, using real demographic data and mathematical modeling to evaluate epidemic risks.

Findings

Worker-based merging strategies can support larger social bubbles.

Merging households with at most one worker optimally balances risk and social needs.

The approach allows over 40% of the population to form social bubbles in some regions.

Abstract

During the COVID-19 crisis, policymakers have implemented "social bubble" merging strategies, which allowed people from different households to meet and interact. Although these measures can mitigate the negative effects of extreme isolation, they also introduce additional contacts that may facilitate disease spread. As a result, several modeling studies have explored the epidemiological impact of different household-merging strategies, in which the selection of households to be merged is guided by specific demographic criteria, such as household size or the age composition of their members. Here we investigate an alternative pairing strategy in which households are merged according to the number of economically active (working) members. We develop a mathematical model of household networks using real demographic data from multiple regions around the world, and simulate a lockdown scenario in which only economically active individuals can leave their households, while the remaining non-working members stay indoors. By using numerical simulations and the generating function technique, we then estimate the epidemic risk for different household merging strategies. We found that merging strategies based on the number of working members can keep epidemic risk at similar levels as those based on household size. Moreover, the worker-based approach allows significantly more people to form larger social bubbles, exceeding 40\% of the population in some countries. We found that merging households with at most one worker provides the best balance between controlling epidemic risk and addressing people's need for social contact.