Hold the Line.
‘This virus is unforgiving to unwise choices’
As an infectious disease epidemiologist (albeit a junior one), I feel morally obligated to provide information on what we are seeing from a transmission dynamic perspective and how it applies to the social distancing measures. Like any good scientist, I have noticed two things that are either not well articulated or not present in the “literature” of online media. I have also relied on other infectious disease epidemiologists for peer review of this piece.....MUCH MORE
Specifically, I want to make two aspects of these distancing measures very clear and unambiguous....
....“You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit: If one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk. Seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed. If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with. This sounds silly, it’s not. This is not a joke or hypothetical. We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again. Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.”....
