I’m not a fan of buzzwords, but it is what it is. Social Distancing is a concept shy of full quarantine, meant to keep us from large groups of people where viruses spread like crazy. It means canceling large group meetings like church, sporting events, parties and certain types of vacations (e.g. cruises) and its not popular at all. A lot of the time it means someone is going to lose money and that’s never popular. No one wants to be the one to say “we’re going to cancel”, but we need more to say this.
If you are a civic leader, a business leader, a community leader, if you are in charge of your rotary club, your neighborhood watch, your PTA, this is the time to step up and cancel or postpone your next meeting, or move it online. If you’re not the leader, its time to start talking to them about this.
Why do this now? Maybe you think this is all overblown, or its too early to be worried yet. That’s the problem with exponential growth. By the time the problem is obvious, its already way too late.
This graph is from a well written article by Tomas Pueyo with lots of helpful graphs if you are a graph person. It showing the effects of implementing social distancing and the large effect even one day can make. The black line is business as usual. The red line is starting social distancing on day 21 of the outbreak and the green line is starting just one day earlier. The effect is profound, a 40% reduction in the number of cases. Another model I saw this week showed that just a 25% reduction in social contact would result in a 50% reduction of cases. Don’t like models? Want real world data? John Burn-Murdoch has taken data from Johns Hopkins and graphed out the case loads of the various countries battling COVID-19 with fairly predictable results. The only countries that have fairly flat curves are those with very strict quarantine rules. Everyone else is following the course that Italy is taking (we’re about 2 weeks behind them)
The point of all this data? Social distancing/quarantining can work, but it needs to be done now or it will soon be too late. Even a day can make a difference.
So there it is, I posted twice in 2 days. Given my loathing of most social media, that in an of itself should tell you something. Forgive me if I have grammar mistakes. If you need a reference for something I mentioned let me know and I’ll add it. I couldn’t find one of the graphs I mentioned, so I’ll keep looking.