So you may be asking yourself, “as someone who isn’t a healthcare professional, what can I do to protect myself and my community from COVID-19?” I’d say the simplest and most effective thing you can do is reducing the time you spend around other people. I’ll explain below.
Now, handwashing is certainly something you should be in the habit of doing year-round. Washing hands when you get home, when you arrive somewhere, before meals, etc. is just sensible. And I don’t want to discourage it. But it’s not a magic bullet.
Other suggestions (like covering your coughs) are totally sensible and you should do them, but they’re of limited effect. But what does work to contain an epidemic? Reducing exposure in the first place. Rate of spread is a numbers game.
The more people you encounter over time, the larger the probability of encountering an infected person, or, if you’re infected, the more people you infect. You’re trying to minimize the product of people * hours.
Going to the lobby of your building to pick up the mail and encountering one person for 60 seconds isn’t so bad, it’s 1/60th of a person encounter hour . Being in a train car with dozens of people in close quarters for an hour is dozens of person encounter hours.
If the epidemic is around you, you’re trying to minimize that number. If you work from home and see no-one but close family, you’ve kept your number very low. If you spend the day in an auditorium discussing the new company sales plan, you’ve got a very high number.
This model is quite simplistic of course. If you’re locked in with 50 healthy people in close quarters for a week it doesn’t matter much. But as a rule of thumb, you’re not really going to know who is hot and who isn’t. So as a very rough model, this works.
So what minimizes your exposure? More nights watching Netflix with your spouse and kids, few or none at the movie theater. More nights eating at home, fewer or none eating in crowded restaurants. Telecommute instead of riding a crowded train and then being at a crowded office.
You don’t have to wait for the authorities to tell you that thousands of people in your city are infected; you can take the prudent step of slowly re-arranging your life right now to avoid other people, just for the few months until this is more under control.
And again, it’s a numbers game. You don’t have to be terrified of going to the supermarket if you need to. Just try to lower your person exposure hours as much as is _reasonable_ for a while. When the authorities do tell you that it’s in your town, cut back as much as possible.
You’ll be protecting both yourself and others. You’ll be reducing the chance that you’re spreading this to other people, or that you’ll end up being part of the overcrowding problem at hospitals. It’s not a sexy high-tech measure, but it’s effective.
And if the other people at work think it’s crazy to be worried about this, after all, some high elected official said not to worry yet, well, telecommuting is pretty normal right now, and you don’t have to push others if they won’t listen. You can just do it yourself.
Oh, and in answer to the question “should I be thinking about cancelling that siteseeing trip I’d planned and rescheduling it for when this has calmed down?”, I think that’s pretty easy to know. The travel will expose you to a lot of people. That city can wait for you to visit.
Should your company be encouraging people to work from home for a few months if they’re just as productive there? Should it be cancelling unnecessary in-person meetings for a while? Of course, it will reduce exposure risk, which is, again, a numbers game.
Anyway, be safe out there. None of us have memories of the 1918 flu pandemic. We’re not personally used to thinking about these things. Caution, especially inexpensive or free caution, is cheap. It’s worth protecting your community, and the life you save might even be your own.
