I'd like to highlight a few things regarding the thinking behind policies being implemented in different places now:
- 'Flatten the curve' should be a common concept, so everyone should do their part. Large gatherings (night clubs, etc., concerts, movie theaters) are a bad idea since these have a possibility to make the number of patients 'explode' around 5-7 days after the event. If you are 100% sure that all the five hundred people at your gathering do not have the virus, then go ahead, you're perfectly safe. All that said, keep in mind that the two curves we see are usually a little misleading as they only represent the 'concept'. The true picture varies depending on where you live and how much your local health system can cope with. So the 'bad' curve with no mitigation might be really steep, and the 'safe line' may actually much, much lower than the infographics will have you believe -- maybe it goes up to only about 3% of the total height of the 'bad curve'. Here's a simple way to think about it: say your local community has 30 ICU beds and equipment, which means you can probably only care for 30 people at a time. Don't forget that once they're in critical care, they're going to occupy that bed for an average of two or three weeks, so it's not like you can then have them recover in a few days and get a new batch of 30 people in) The number of your local ICU beds represents 5% of the people your community can afford to have be sick at the same time *over three weeks*. And that will actually leave *no* beds for other patients who come in with strokes and other things.
- The 'magical number of 14 days' is not arbitrary. It's not about 'shutting everything down so we can rethink things'. It's about breaking the chain of infection. If everyone in the world stays home for 14 days right now, most of the virus will simply die out, as they have no new host to infect. Yes, there are cases where people are infectious up to more than 30 days, but those are very rare.
- If there are cases from 'community spread' (they don't know where they got the virus from -- e.g. no history of travel, no link to people with known) then the virus is certainly around somewhere in your community. Be very, very careful. A community-wide 14-day curfew of some sort is going to help, because it's going to get rid of most of the virus in circulation. However, if a large part of your community is still going about in 'business as usual' mode, closing only schools or restaurants for 14 days might slow the spread but ultimately is not going to be that effective. The problem right now everywhere is there's no coordinated effort across different sectors to do this. [And, yes, if the whole world simply stops for 14 days, we can completely reset this pandemic. Of course, this is unrealistic, so we need to do what we can.]
- If your community does *not* have community spread yet, practicing basic social distancing (e.g. no 'large' gathering, especially when there are people who have traveled from outside the community) and personal hygiene should be okay for now. However, keep a lookout for reports of people who say they can't get tested even when they have all the symptoms. Even without official numbers, it's still possible that there *is* community spread in your area.
- If it gets bad in your community and your local government issues a 14-day lockdown/curfew of any sort, that's a good thing. The numbers are still going to UP for a while, every day, for another 14 days or so, but that's all right, because at the time of the lockdown, you've broken the chain of transmission, and it's simply the case of 'infected people starting to show symptoms'. After 14 days, the numbers will go DOWN, because no new people are getting infected.
