Social Distancing

Transcript

Let me first start by saying what social distancing absolutely is not. It is not large crowds of patients flooding emergency departments sitting in close proximity to one another while waiting to be seen. Social distancing describes a practice of maintaining a distance of at least six feet between you and someone else in order to significantly limit the risk of either transmitting the virus or becoming infected. In the last week in response to many who either did not understand or consciously chose to not observe social distancing, many state leaders have issued restrictions that make it much harder to not practice social distancing.

Remember, COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus) needs a living host to grow and replicate, meaning that the greater the distance is between infected people and uninfected people, the less likely it is that we’re going to transmit the virus. When we practice social distancing, when we keep ourselves away from others when we feel sick, it limits the ability of the virus to be transmitted to people who do not have it. And when we do those things, we can decrease the number of sick individuals and speed up the time when the number of cases begins to decrease in the community.