When asked when he plans to end the #StayAtHomeOrder, President Trump said Monday, “I’m not looking at months.” Problem is, without months of these measures, the US will see a catastrophic loss of life. There’s a right way to do this, and a wrong one 1/ wired.trib.al/2aWFbya
At some point, the US will have to start relaxing some restrictions in a targeted way, but doing so will require the large-scale deployment of testing, community screening, and contact tracing. None of these are up and running yet in the US 2/
Abandoning social distancing without these systems in place would be disastrous. The US now has 44k+ cases, making it one of the worst-hit countries in the world behind Italy and China. But the testing debacle means that number is likely just a fraction of the actual cases 3/ 
What hospitals are seeing now are people who contracted the disease weeks ago. There’s a lag between when an outbreak occurs and when it can be observed. Which means things are about to get a LOT worse 4/
The purpose of social distancing measures when observed cases are still relatively low (like now, in most places in the US) is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by a sudden surge of sick patients needing a limited number of respirators weeks later 5/
If you contracted #Covid19 today, it would take days to feel sick and another week to get test results. If you went to work in the meantime, you could infect many others, adding to the outbreak’s exponential growth. But stay home, and no one else gets sick 6/
The most illustrative example of how implementing social distancing measures now can save lives later is what happened in the Italian cities of Lodi and Bergamo. Both were hit by #Covid19 in mid-February, and for weeks their infection rates looked nearly identical 7/
Then, on March 8, Bergamo’s shot up so rapidly that the Italian Army was later sent in to ferry coffins away from overwhelmed morgues. What had happened on March 8? Nothing. Both cities were by then in full lockdown 8/
But Bergamo hadn't imposed social distancing restrictions until March 7, while Lodi had done so 2 weeks before. It took that long for Lodi’s policies to show results. That means the effects of the US’ restrictions won’t reveal themselves until the end of April at the earliest 9/
So, will the US be Lodi or will it be Bergamo? Our country is just now entering the crucial weeks that will decide its trajectory toward one or the other. There will be a time to relax social distancing measures, but now is not it 10/ wired.trib.al/2aWFbya
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