Hey y'all, here's a great research paper explaining that for social distancing to be effective, we need a SIGNIFICANT reduction of social contacts and a LOT of participation from the public. SHORT THREAD 1/n bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11… 
2/ This paper was actually studying how much medication needs to be stockpiled in order to treat a future epidemic. The researchers wanted to find out how much the stockpiling can be reduced if the public can be relied upon to do social distancing during that epidemic.
3/ For #coronavirus, the issue isn't the amount of *medication* that is available, but the number of ICU beds with *ventilators* that are available. It is too late to increase the number of ventilators, so we *must* implement enough social distancing to live within that number.
4/ In this study it depended on a number of factors: what is the Basic Reproduction Number, R0, of the virus; what fraction of the population complies with social distancing; and how deeply we cut the number of our social contacts.
5/ Also, it depended on how long we continue the social distancing. They studied 12 weeks, 16 weeks, and 24 weeks. That's a long time to keep it going!
6/ The R0 for coronavirus is estimated to be between 2 and 3, meaning that on average each person gives the virus to 2 or 3 other people. The study only considered R0 as high as 2, and they found that the need for stockpiling medical supplies gets higher as R0 gets higher.
7/ Here's the case for 12 weeks of social distancing. For R0=2, they found if 81% of the population cuts social contacts to ~1/3 of normal (69% reduction), the need for stockpiling is reduced only a little: instead of needing to treat 35% of the people, they'll need to treat 27%
8/ That is not good, because it is only a 23% reduction in the amount of medical supplies needed for that situation: (35%-27%)/35% = 23%. (Seeing what happened in Italy and at first in Wuhan, we need to reduce the demand for ICU beds with ventilators on a FAR greater scale.)
9/ The case they studied (stockpiling antiviral drugs for an epidemic) is a v different than the case with coronavirus (having enough ICU ventilators), but the study is useful to show that social distancing works only if we have high compliance and deep cuts in social contacts.
10/ If the R0 of coronavirus is much worse than 2.0, then it will require even deeper cuts in our social contacts and higher compliance from the population. The paper concludes that we *cannot* reasonably rely on social distancing to get away with having less medical supplies...
11/ Today, it is too late to stockpile ICU beds & ventilators, so what choice do we have? We'll need deeper cuts in social contacts & higher compliance than the researchers assumed. This is why I agreed with this Medium article calling for strict measures:
12/12 So here is the admission that I'm not an expert in any of this, just a concerned citizen sharing a research paper I found useful. I think if we act now, working together seriously, we *can* limit the harm. Let's do it, please!
