7 Steps We Can Take Right Now To Slow the Spread of Coronavirus, According to Infectious Disease Experts

By now, we’ve all heard about “social distancing,” the public health measures we should to be taking to slow the exponential spread of the coronavirus by avoiding close contact with other people.

“We have reached a tipping point where the idea that we will be able to contain this in a few spots is just no longer viable,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, “and now we are going to have widespread infection across the US.”

But if we take action now — as in right now, today — many of us can still protect ourselves and others, particularly our most vulnerable citizens, from infection, and avoid overwhelming our health care system with a wave of sick patients. Here’s what epidemiologists and infectious disease experts recommend:

Cancel concerts, conferences, parades, and yes, even the Boston Marathon.

“The key thing is to reduce contact between people, and that’s especially true for vulnerable people,” said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And the ways to do that include a lot of different things: The canceling of big events is one — and a really important one — and that includes, unfortunately, things that a lot of us like to do.”

Think concerts, music festivals, parades, and yes, the Boston Marathon, Lipsitch said. Jha agrees: “My take is, you know, even after the marathon bombing, we came back the next year. It’s very painful for me to say we should cancel it, but we should cancel it.”

Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also recommends avoiding crowded venues, like movie theaters or churches. “Individuals, as much as public health agencies and the governments, are on the front lines of the response,” he said, especially if we want to avoid extreme lock down measures, like those taken in Italy and China. “Our shot at stopping that is to do smaller inconveniences now, in order to avoid having to take dramatic actions later.”