We’ve heard the excuses pour in far and wide from college students disappointed to miss out on a spring semester of jello shots, darties, and wild frat affairs. Sorry to burst your Bud Light bubble, but sweaty half nude bodies grinding in a tiny dark room and giant sticky tubs of jungle juice are also COVID-19’s favorite hangout spot. For anyone still tempted to go out into crowded places under the pretense of falsehoods like “It’s no worse than the flu!” do yourself a favor.
Give a read to these 10 articles on the absolute necessity of social distancing.
1. Medium: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now
“Countries that act fast reduce the number of deaths at least by 10x.”
2. NPR: Coronavirus: Over 1,000 Cases Now In U.S., And ‘It’s Going To Get Worse,’ Fauci Says
“How much worse we’ll get will depend on our ability to do two things: to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside, and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. Bottom line, it’s going to get worse.”
3. USA Today: Crowded bars and theme parks: Why won’t some people practice social distancing during coronavirus outbreak?
“There’s this attitude right now about, ‘Well I’m OK, and if I feel sick I just won’t go out.’ This is a situation where we need to change our behavior according not to what’s good for us, but what’s good for our region and the whole population.”
4. The Atlantic: Cancel Everything
“…This disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the wantonly irresponsible insist on comparing it. Early guesstimates, made before data were widely available, suggested that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being about 1 percent. If that guess proves true, the coronavirus is 10 times as deadly as the flu.”
5. Newsweek: Young and Unafraid of the Coronavirus Pandemic? Good for you. Now stop killing people
“Most of my childhood friends are now doctors working in north Italy. In Milan, in Bergamo, in Padua, they are having to choose between intubating a 40-year-old with two kids, a 40-year old who is fit and healthy with no co-morbidities, and a 60-year-old with high blood pressure, because they don’t have enough beds.”
6. USA Today: Ohio coronavirus patient describes her fight: ‘Nothing I had ever quite experienced’
“It was hard to get a breath in and my chest felt constricted. It was like nothing I had ever quite experienced.”
7. CNN: Infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of coronavirus more than we realized
“There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people.”
8. Washington Post: Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”
“Even with different results, moderate social distancing will usually outperform the attempted quarantine, and extensive social distancing usually works best of all.”
9. The Atlantic: A Frontline Physician Speaks Out on the Coronavirus
“Suddenly we have multiple floors of those patients filling up beds. And then 15 percent of them begin to crash and develop acute respiratory distress requiring mechanical ventilation to save their life—all at the same time—and then we don’t have enough ICU beds and mechanical ventilators to manage the patients that are all crashing at the same time. We will be [grappling with] the types of ethical dilemmas that we really only see in wartime in this country.”
10. Mother Jones: Charts That Will Convince You to Stay Home
“…Your choice to socially distance yourself today can prevent 2,400 people from being infected over a month. Yet if you wait another week to hole up, you’ll only avert 600 infections. The coronavirus may spread exponentially, but so do the benefits of staying home and checking out cool charts.”
