The rationale is to ensure that people with serious illness can seek medical care, and those who are infectious but asymptomatic or have mild illness don’t pass it on to anyone else. Countries that had epidemics first, such as China and South Korea, have brought cases down dramatically through widespread testing and social distancing. Since the new coronavirus can spread unnoticed so easily, many governments have felt the best way to ensure people have minimal contact with each other is to order total lockdowns, with people only being allowed to leave to get food or medicine, and to practise social distancing when they do leave their houses. Given the rapid spread of the virus, social lockdown is urgent to bring overall transmission down, and see whether testing followed by isolation could be effective – this is all in an attempt to ‘flatten the curve’ or reduce infections and spread cases out over a longer time frame to avoid overwhelming health systems.

Essentially, the less contact people have with each other, the less the virus can spread. In the absence of treatment or a vaccine, ceasing most human contact is really the only way to stop the spread of the virus. Why are some countries enforcing quarantine at home? It is important that every single person adheres to this, whether or not they think they are sick.įor people who are symptomatic, or have been in contact with someone who is showing symptoms, most countries are advising total self-isolation, for a week or two in order to limit further transmission of the virus. The World Health Organization is starting to refer to it as physical distancing instead to emphasise the importance of being far away enough to avoid infection from the respiratory droplets that carry the virus. The ability of individuals who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, but can still spread the disease, explains why social distancing – limiting contact with others – in addition to other actions such as washing your hands and not touching your face, is so critical. Why is social distancing important in slowing the pandemic? This means that before health experts were aware of the problem and started to recommend control measures, the virus had already spread to multiple countries. The answer seems to be precisely because the new coronavirus is less deadly – thousands of people with either no symptoms or very mild symptoms have been spreading the virus unaware that they were even infected. So, if COVID-19 is less deadly than previous epidemic threats, why has it spread so far and wide that it has brought the world to a standstill? The “case fatality rate” (CFR), or risk of dying from the new coronavirus, is about 4.4%, (although this risk varies by geography, and also can change over the course of a pandemic) is also less deadly than SARS (10%) or MERS-CoV (34%). If each of those people go about their day as normal, and infect another 2.5 people, within a month, 406 people would be infected just from that first infection.ĬOVID-19 is more infectious than other coronaviruses such as SARS or MERS-CoV. For COVID-19, each person with the virus can go on to infect around 2.5 people.

Viruses have varying abilities to infect people.

How has the new coronavirus spread across the world so fast?

Coronavirus total lockdown