As painful as the last 9 days of social distancing have been, disease modelers think Americans may need to be at home much longer to truly “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 infection.
March 25, 2020 -- As painful as the last 9 days of social distancing have been, disease modelers think Americans may need to be at home much longer to truly “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 infection and avoid overwhelming the critical care capacity of U.S. hospitals., which was posted Tuesday on the preprint server MedRxiv, found that one-time social distancing -- by itself -- does very little to reduce the burden on critical care beds and equipment.
“A too hasty retreat from social distancing risks a threat to our health care infrastructure, which itself carries huge economic consequences,” he says. While a single burst of social distancing probably won’t reduce the number of infections we eventually see in this country, study authors say it does buy time to get other efforts into place.
For their study, Grad and his team looked at different periods of social distancing in the U.S. -- everything from 1 to 5 months. They also modeled the strictness of those periods of isolation, trying to imagine social distancing strategies that cut the contagiousness of the virus by 20% to 60%. This is particularly true if the seasons play a role in the spread of the disease, as they did with the 1918 flu, which infected about a third of the world’s population in two waves. The reason is that social distancing can have a downside. Isolation creates a pool of people without any immunity to the infection. When restrictions on movement are lifted, those people are susceptible and once again mixing with others, and it creates a second wave of infection.
The amount of social distancing needed could also change if researchers get a vaccine or find a drug that's effective against the disease.
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