How long social distancing for coronavirus will have to last depends on these factors
How long are we going to have to keep this up? The closed schools, working from home, six feet of personal space and zombie-apocalypse empty streets?
It’s the question now preoccupying America as millions of parents silently scream it into the void amid the coronavirus pandemic. But it is an especially hard one for science to answer.
The best and most honest reply, according to epidemiologists and virologists, is simple: “It depends.” It’s not going to be over anytime soon — a matter of months rather than weeks. And these are the key factors that will determine just how many months:
It depends on when U.S. cases finally reach their peak
In recent days, the rapidly increasing number of confirmed U.S. cases has begun to resemble the beginning exponential curves of other countries such as Italy. While the novel coronavirus that causes the respiratory infection covid-19 continues to spread in Italy, new daily cases in other countries like China and South Korea are finally tapering off — a sign that they have passed the peak of their immediate crises.
“It depends if a week from now, we look like Italy or South Korea,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
It took China roughly two months from the beginning of its outbreak — and a month from the time the gravity of the situation was understood — for the country to reach its peak. And it took South Korea roughly half a month.
It is impossible, however, to say when that peak will arrive in the United States for many reasons — chief among them the fact that we don’t yet know the true number of cases because of how limited testing remains in America.
The U.S. situation, one epidemiologist said, is the equivalent of someone asking an exterminator what it will take to get rid of rats in a basement they’ve been too afraid to enter for weeks. You have to turn the lights on and examine the droppings first to figure out the scope of the problem. And the nation’s response in the absence of that knowledge has been sluggish compared with that of other countries. [Continue reading…]