
When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over? - elorant
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-social-distancing-over-back-to-normal/608752/
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bryanlarsen
Long before things are completely back to normal, we'll have a "new normal"
that allows businesses to reopen under strict anti-virus protocols.

We can't do it in North America yet because we don't have enough masks, gloves
and other PPE.

Example from China:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddx_z1Qtn9w&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddx_z1Qtn9w&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
PappaPatat
This. There are many possible scenarios how to end the shutdown, not one is
back to normal on Monday.

~~~
capableweb
> not one is back to normal on Monday

No one in the US seriously believe this right? You're all behind schedule and
the worst have yet to come. As far I understand, there are many places in the
US where a lockdown/quarantine hasn't even taken place yet, so count on a
couple of months before things get back to normal.

~~~
scarface74
Unfortunately, the belief that everything will be back to normal by Easter is
coming from the President.

~~~
capableweb
Heh, I guess you get what you vote for

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CloudYeller
The words "contact" and "tracing" didn't even appear once in the article. Are
people outside of Asia not even considering test'n'trace as a possibility?
Privacy concerns aside, it seems like an effective way to save lives without
forcing everyone to stay home indefinitely.

~~~
lucideer
Contact tracing is, as far as I've read, the very first strategy initiated by
most Western governments and health organisations. In the early stages of
reported cases.

As it stands, my country is still in relatively early stages compared to many
others, and contact tracing became unviable as a first defence well over a
week ago. Over 60% of our cases are community transmission.

We're still doing contact tracing, it's probably worthwhile, but it's not
going to be a major factor in mitigation.

~~~
CloudYeller
What about contact tracing apps? Tracing won't work unless you know who was
nearby each infected person. It's difficult to find that info unless a big
portion of people are using a tracker app. Is that sort of thing happening
where you are?

~~~
lucideer
It's been announced here (Ireland), though the official government contact-
tracing app is as yet unreleased. It's believed to be a based on Singapore's
BTLE one.

It's largely irrelevant though. As much as it may help a little, this just
isn't manageable through contact tracing. While Singapore are being lauded for
their CT approach, they've still largely been successful in their efforts due
to social distancing (and a culture of widespread adherance), along with
things like widespread testing, and effective govt. communication of data.

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ianai
If I understand it right, in a “perfect universe” if every person was able to
stay home for 14 days and also perfectly avoided infecting anyone then the
virus would effectively have died off. The 14 day’s might not be the exact
time required but it illustrates a concept. We of course can’t uphold that
perfect universe. So we’re stuck using that technique to slow it’s roll enough
that it won’t overwhelm and kill like 3% of 7 billion people in addition to
the usual attrition rate.

~~~
erikstarck
It’s interesting to think about how many other viruses would perish if there
were no new hosts for them to live in. Maybe we should start doing this every
year as a sort of cleansing of viruses? 3 weeks in February - quarantine
weeks. Every year.

~~~
yodsanklai
It's not going to work. This should be done worldwide and you need some
interaction for people to be able to live.

~~~
ianai
It’s doable with a year of planning and social initiative. But we’d also need
a sea change in our laws to make it not a yearly recession.

~~~
tzs
I wonder if you could do it as a kind of near universal social and economic
time-out? Let's say it starts on a Sunday night and is to last for two weeks.

What happens is that everything starting Monday is pushed back two weeks.
Stock markets close. Non-essential workers stay home. Non-essentially
businesses close.

During the two weeks, government pays for everyone's utilities, food, rent,
and so on, both for people and companies.

The idea is to as much as possible pause the normal economy for a couple of
weeks, and then resume it hopefully pretty much right where it left off, with
the government seeing to everyone's needs during the economic pause.

Do this once a year as a readiness exercise, probably trying to time it around
when that year's flu season is getting serious so that it may also help reduce
the intensity of flu season.

Over the years, the government should over fund this to build up a cushion, so
that whenever the next pandemic comes around they have enough to do longer
than a two week pause if necessary.

~~~
Exmoor
I am not a microbiologist, but I'm not confident that this "three week annual
quarantine" even works in an ideal world, much less the imperfect world that
we actually live in.

Is it a guarantee that 100.0000000000% of the population will eliminate the
virus with their own immune system in three weeks? If one or two people with
poor immune systems carry around the virus for one day past the quarantine
then we we would very quickly have gotten back to where we started.

It's also implausible to quarantine everyone for the same three week period.
Are we just supposed to let anyone with a major health crisis die at home if
it happens mid-quarantine? What would we do about the millions of people who
require round the clock care in nursing facilities, etc.?

Additionally, I'm willing to bet that if we dedicated 5.8% of worldwide GDP
(21 days out of 365) to fighting viruses, the results would be much more
successful and less invasive.

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docdeek
My wife is already talking about moving out of the city to get a bit of space
and it's only been two weeks indoors for us. Anecdotal, of course, I think the
desire to be away from others is going to persist a while.

~~~
ianai
Interesting. I wonder how prevalent and deep such reflections will be upon
people after this.

It’s possibly the best thing we could have done for the people who claim to be
ok with the standard of pollution and climate change baked into an oil based
civilization. Like pulling your hand out of a warm bath of water it’s been
soaking in for a few seconds and plunging it back in the same water feels much
warmer.

~~~
asveikau
Density of human development also has benefits, though. The US lifestyle is
especially bad at some of this. People think that their car-centric suburban
or exurban life is away from chaos and closer to nature, but actually, they
are driving their cars everywhere, increasing costs of getting goods to them,
destroying the planet in the process.

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thymanl23
The crux of the article: "The answer is simple, if not exactly satisfying:
when enough of the population—possibly 60 or 80 percent of people—is resistant
to COVID-19"

But then in the next paragraph nonchalantly says "though we don’t yet know if
recovering from the disease confers any immunity at all"

I'm not sure sure how articles like these get published.

~~~
vikramkr
I mean, that makes perfect sense. Itll stop when people are resistant. Are
people becoming resistant? We dont know. Its presenting the state of things,
and that includes uncertainty

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SpicyLemonZest
It's a very misleading sense of uncertainty. There's every reason to believe
people gain long-lasting immunity, and no way to concretely prove it right
now. No public health authority is seriously considering the possibility that
survivors aren't immune.

~~~
capableweb
In general, in science, if you're uncertain, you're considering everything,
even that survivors might not be immune. There is every reason to assume
anything can be possible right now, as we don't have enough data. Once we have
data, you can start to reason and consider things, but we're not there yet.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I just don't think that's true. Every infectious disease expert I've seen has
been very confident that survivors gain long-lasting immunity, based on their
knowledge of how other coronaviruses and diseases in general work. We don't
have a ton of specific data about this specific virus, but it's not accurate
to say we know nothing at all.

Even if it were true, there are decisions about strategy and response that
must be made now and can't wait for data to come in, and those decisions are
being made under the presumption that survivors become immune.

~~~
capableweb
> it's not accurate to say we know nothing at all

No one is saying this. We do know things about viruses in general, but again,
don't have enough data about this particular one to say anything for sure.

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dirtyid
When people break not when policy dictates. People get complacent once numbers
go down and there seems like containment which looks to be happening in Korean
and Hong Kong.

Young adults living in cramped share houses in a city aren't going to stay in
for the summer or go celibate for the months decision makers are thinking. At
least in dense urban areas, there's too much quality of life disparities for
long term behavior change like this to be feasible.

IMO Social distancing is to buy a few precious months max for logistics and
medical system to prepare. Pretty soon economic stress exceeds fear of the
disease. The financial aid package in most of the countries that can afford it
leaves a lot of people behind.

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sys_64738
If it lasts too long then it'll be over when people grow tired of it. People
will weigh the risk/rewards and decide for themselves. If the authorities are
not able to control the initial trickle then the dam will burst and people
will decide what to do themselves. There's a very thin line of control of this
whole issue.

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yodsanklai
From CNN FAQ [1]

"How long will we have to keep social distancing? Probably for several months.
But you might have to do it “over and over again,” since the outbreak could
come in waves.

Research by the Imperial College in Great Britain “would suggest you have to
institute these kinds of measures for five months, very vigorously,” said Dr.
Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center.

“And then you may be able to relax for a period. And then you would re-
institute as the cases go up again. But we’re basically looking at doing this
over and over and over again, even after a five-month period of strict social
distancing, in order to curb cases until we have a vaccine.”

Health officials say we’re at least a year away from the first publicly
available coronavirus vaccine. In the meantime, they say everyone should avoid
large crowds and stay at least 6 feet away from others."

I hope we can relax the lockdown and still get satisfying results (following
some Pareto's principle). For instance, avoiding indoor events maybe a good
measure. But avoiding people to go exercise outside isn't really needed? Also,
hopefully we'll get masks and tests in a near future and that we'll make it
easier to contain the virus too.

[1]
[https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-...](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-
questions-answers/)

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I think they're taking the Imperial model with more credulity than is
warranted here. Social distancing for 5 months was the suppression scenario
the paper considered, but I don't think anyone believes the current set of
severe restrictions could be sustained for that long. 5 months of a ban on
large events, maybe.

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cjcenizal
I think a worst case scenario is one in which:

\- The virus becomes seasonal, like the flu

\- Like the flu, every year there are new strains (so surviving it doesn’t
grant immunity)

\- And we’re unable to develop a vaccine for it

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong but this scenario implies that the
situation we’re in now becomes the new normal. Every year, we’ll lose an
additional percentage of our elderly and those with pre-existing conditions.
Medical systems will either be ground down by repeated surges, economies will
be ground down by enforced social distancing, or both.

What else would be in the cards?

~~~
logicchains
> Like the flu, every year there are new strains (so surviving it doesn’t
> grant immunity)

Even if it mutates, the immune systems of people who recovered from it this
year will still be able to fight it much better next year, because they've
learned how to fight that kind of virus. This is why even though the flu
mutates every year, it isn't particularly lethal: our bodies have learned how
to fight that kind of virus.

If however one were to take the flu to e.g. an uncontacted tribe who'd never
encountered influenza before, it'd completely devastate them, much as how
viruses from European settlers were estimated to have killed a double-digit
percentage of the native American peoples.

~~~
ffdjjjffjj
We don’t develop immunity to other coronaviruses such as the common cold, so I
don’t think we can assume we will for this one.

~~~
PeterisP
We do develop immunity to other coronaviruses such as the ones causing common
cold - thing is, there are so many different viruses (some of them are
coronaviruses, some not - there's a huge variety) causing similar symptoms, so
we don't even attempt to diagnose _which_ of the many common-cold-group
viruses you have because we don't care; but you do develop immunity against
that particular single virus.

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alexandercrohde
Worthless article. Basically says 1-month to years. Well thanks Sherlock.

~~~
vikramkr
The article is giving you the answer to the question. The real world has this
thing called uncertainty. There are a lot of different ways things could go,
amd if the article said itll be uber in 4 months exactly, that would be total
bull. If the only thing people consider "worthy" reporting is reporting that
oversimplifies hard questions and pretends there no uncertainty to give
simple, pleasing and wrong answers, and the reporting people consider
"worthless" are articles that grapple with the complexity of a situation
ultimately leading to unsatisfying answers but with a sense of why its
unsatisfying, well, that would make sense with what news reporting looks like
today.

~~~
catalogia
I didn't need an article to tell me _" dunno lol"_. I knew I didn't know
already.

~~~
JadeNB
> I didn't need an article to tell me " _dunno lol_ ". I knew I didn't know
> already.

But I think a lot of people _don 't_ know that they don't know. There are lots
of problems where the scientific consensus is in, but the will isn't there to
implement it—whether due to denial of the science or to fear of the costs.
This is a situation where the scientific consensus _isn 't_ in; no-one knows
for sure—and that's not a state in which the modern person is used to living,
or realising they're living.

~~~
catalogia
> _But I think a lot of people don 't know they don't know_

I think that's generally true, but probably not in this particular case. In
any case, the answer of _" We don't know"_ is only three words long and could
have been put in the headline, but then it wouldn't have been exploitative
clickbait...

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mrfusion
No one really needs to be near other people. I think just keep it going. A lot
of industries really aren’t essential to life. Maybe we should question why we
need them. Theme parks, sports, gyms.

~~~
PakG1
Physiologically, no, we don't. Psychologically? I think there will be issues.
For your sports example, there is definitely a primal need being fulfilled,
otherwise athletic competitions would not have existed in ancient times. It's
true that many industries aren't essential to life. That doesn't mean they're
not essential to wellbeing.

~~~
JadeNB
> Physiologically, no, we don't.

The grandparent mentions gyms as one of these non-essential institutions, and
they or their equivalent _are_ something we need even physiologically. The
impacts on health of not being able to get out and move regularly, much less
to have serious exercise, are going to worsen the already serious problem of
obesity.

~~~
PakG1
To be fair, you don't need a gym to get out and move regularly or have serious
exercise. Lot of people just got in the park every day, and plenty of
exercises exist that use only body weight for strength training. You're not
going to become Arnie in his prime, but you'll be fit.

~~~
JadeNB
I agree that there are things one _can_ do (and I do get out in the park as
often as convenient, but social distancing there is hard), but are there
things one _will_ do? I'm in reasonably good shape from indoor climbing, but
that only works because I like doing it so much that I don't notice I'm
exercising. So far, the inertia of having to set up a body-weight routine
(rather than continue with my existing climbing-gym routine) has kept me
constantly attending to other things first, so barely active. And that's
someone with a habit of physical activity who really dislikes having to skip
the routines—so what about those people without such a habit?

