First of all, it should be understood that all of the guidelines about washing hands, keeping a 6 foot/2 meter distance, avoiding gatherings of more than an arbitrary number of people, et cetera, are just general guidance based upon prior experience with public health measures and will in no way guarantee to improve your odds of not being infected. In fact, there are no really good estimates of the behavior and transmissibility of the virus because of the significant delay in some patients between being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus) and the onset of COVID-19 (the medical nomenclature for the disease that some people suffer). The media and general public continue to conflate the two but in fact there appear to be a substantial number of people who have tested positively for antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus (indicating that they have had a significant viral load) but have exhibited no signs or symptoms of COVID-19. Given how limited testing has been and continues to be, and that it has been restricted to people either exhibiting signs and symptoms or have been in the immediate proximity of COVID-19 sufferers, there is a strong possibility of asymptomatic transmission, and that the incidence in the population of anyone in or near a major population center could be far greater than suggested by public health numbers. It also seems apparent that the virus can be transmitted by aerosol vector as the original SARS-CoV virus responsible for the 2003 Hong Kong outbreak.
Second, while you may not be concerned about the consequences of being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 or contracting the COVID-19 illness, and the people you gather with may be equally indifferent, the reality is that by engaging in unnecessary social contact you may transmit or receive the virus and then transmit it to other people by incidental contact. Even though it is likely that you will eventually come into contact with the virus, the fewer paths it has to spread, the lower overall rate of effective spread (as measured by the R-0 value you have been hearing the talking heads yammering on about in the past few days). Even reducing transmission rates by a factor of two will have a significant impact upon the overall rate of infection which gives more time for people who may have severe reactions to the virus to be distributed in time and thus not overloading our increasingly fragile critical health care systems and underequipped facilities and requiring critical patient triage as has been seen in China, Iran, and Italy. Even shifting the average rate of infection by a week or two across a significant amount of the population allows freeing up beds and respirators for patients in critical need and reducing the case fatality rate due to an avoidable lack of respiration support or other care measures.
Third, you should be concerned about contracting the illness right now because while you may not be in a high risk demographic, it is simply not possible to be assured that some aspect of the viral interaction does not provoke a strong response in you. Respiratory infections can progress from benign to lift-threatening in a matter of hours depending on cofactors, including the presence of previously weakly pathogenic bacteria. There is also the reality that coronaviruses as a class are particularly prone to mutation, and there have in fact been reports of researchers in China reporting evidence of mutation. Since the CDC only started growing the virus in their labs in early February (and it is unclear to the extent they have been able to cultivate multiple samples) the variability that this novel coronavirus, which is previously uncharacterized and strongly suspected to be recently zoonotic (transferred from animal host to human, and therefore has not evolved to co-exist in a human host without reaction as thousands of existing viruses do in every person) is unknown, as is the effectiveness of antibodies developed against one strain in fighting off another. In other words it is possible that you could be infected and develop a resistance to one strain of SARS-CoV-2 only to be infected with a different strain for which you have little or no inherent resistance, as it is with the various families of enteroviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, and other viruses that cause seasonal colds, or the families of influenza A and B viruses that cause ‘the flu’.
And again, the goal of social distancing and isolation is to slow the spread of these viruses. This has a critical effect in addition to blunting the peak rates of COVID-19 illness; it also allows the virus to adapt to be more benign within the population, as well as developing better care measures and (maybe) an effective vaccine. As more virulent strains burn out, more benign strains may become predominate and offer at least some protection to build up immunity even if someone is exposed to a more virulent strain. By participating in the recommended public hygiene and social distancing measures you are helping to blunt the rate of infection giving people with a potentially higher likelihood of contracting a severe case of COVID-19 a better chance, even if in just the aggregate. Or, you can ignore these guidelines and contribute to a situation like that in Italy, where people are dying while waiting just to get into a hospital, or Iran, where satellite images show the excavation of mass grave sites. But realize that by doing this, you are putting people like ThelmaLou at greater risk. The impact may be lost in the aggregation, but the effects are very real and personal to people at high risk for contracting the disease.
By the way, everyone should be absolutely outraged about the public health response to this pandemic and going right up to the top. It is certain that the unwillingness of the Chinese to share information about the extent of the outbreak and their inability to control it has had significant effects on allowing the disease to get a foothold outside of Wuhan (and I’m not convinced that their most recent response to reopen businesses and schools will not result in a mass flareup) but the United States, Japan, and Europe had plenty of warning to at least start a public health informational campaign. In retrospect, completely containing the virus was probably never possible given the long latency period and likelihood of asymptomatic and aerosol transmission, but starting an education campaign about the need for social distancing back in January, giving lead time for businesses and institutions to make plans for remote work and interaction, and otherwise educating and indoctrinating the public in the need for public hygiene measures could have gone a long way toward limiting the rate of spread, and could have been done in a way to minimize public panic. Instead–and in the interests of not making this political I won’t name any names, but I think everyone is aware of the biggest and absolute best perpetrators–certain leading figures have spoken to the public in manner and word dismissive of the potential hazard, spreading factually untrue information about how the virus may be spread, and seemingly intentionally undermining the efforts of public health officials to inform the public. This is absolutely criminal negligence of the most absurd kind.
This is not some unexpected threat that came out of nowhere to blindside officials; epidemiologists have been warning about this very type of pandemic for decades as the degree and rate of zoonosis has been better understood. A major motion picture starring all those pretty people you see at the Oscars every year was made by Steven Soderbergh back in 2011 which presented this threat in a very realistic fashion, and popular science books from Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone to David Quammen’s Spillover have warned about the potential for unconfined zoonotic viruses to emerge into pandemic status in a world in which an infected patient can travel from Singapore to Amsterdam (or Sri Lanka to San Francisco) in a matter of hours with no controls, no truly global medical information network, and health systems that are fragile to these kinds of major health epidemics. There should have been existing plans in place for dealing with a public epidemic which are shared with educations institutions, businesses, and other impacted parties instead of the mad panic of post-equine-barn-door-closing ‘directives’ which sequentially contradict each other or will have little-to-no effect, and in the case of travel bans and trade restrictions may have a negative effect on the ability of the epidemiological community to effectively communicate. By the point that your pandemic has reached New Zealand there is exactly no point in a blanket travel ban or shutting borders down except to be seen doing something, anything, just make it look like we’re not as clueless as the bureaucrats in that Scottish zombie movie with Discount Kate Beckinsale.
As for the o.p., you are presumably an adult and will do as you please, but consider that your actions do have consequences even if they are not personally apparent to you. The guidelines for social distancing aren’t crafted just to ensure that you do not get to have a good time; they are the best if belated measures that you can personally take to help retard the spread of an infectious pathogen you can neither see nor restrain. You may not get a medal or public adoration for making a few sacrifices now in your social life, but the decisions that you make in this regard and at this time matter, even if they don’t seem meaningful to you.
Stranger