Why Can’t We Just Stay Home?
Why we need social distancing
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We all know someone who is struggling with social distancing. Someone who is going from store to store, sort of understanding the risk but unable to help themselves and just sit down.
It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, it’s even understandable. Staying at home when you want to is one thing, but being made to do it makes you feel stressed and, well, isolated.
But let’s be totally clear: it’s dangerous.
What is Social Distancing?
Social distancing, or physical distancing, is the practice of maintaining a physical distance to prevent the spread of contagious disease. It’s not the same as quarantine, which is a complete lack of contact with the outside world, but people are using the terms somewhat interchangeably.
Basically, stay in your home as much as possible, and when you leave your home, stay a minimum of six feet away from people. At the grocery store. On a walk. Wherever you go, there should be a six foot radius around you.
Social distancing in practice is a set of individual behaviors. For some, it means not leaving their house at all. For others, it means only going to work.
But some seem to think it means to carry on like normal but use hand sanitizer.
Social distancing is how we buy time.
Time for our hospitals to treat those currently sick before more get sick. Time for the science to catch up. Time for better treatments to be found. Social distancing is the only thing that can buy us that time.
Social Distancing Makes a Difference
At CV-19’s minimum case fatality rate (CFR), 3.8% of cases will die.
Some people are on board with the idea that these people are going to die anyway, so why not just “save the economy” and stop social distancing?
Besides the obvious moral and ethical issues with sacrificing human lives for the good of the economy (I’m judging you), there are two scientific reasons.
1) Those people may not die if we can flatten the curve to allow time for more consistent treatments and…
