The virus doesn’t care if you are a full family, a group of friends, or total strangers. It just tries to spread. It doesn’t try, it just does. So obviously if you aren’t infected yet, your best chances are to have contact with no one and nothing. But that’s impossible. Or not, the choice is yours where you draw the line.
Limit to 2 people gathering, husband and wife, or a whole family. Obviously separating a whole family would be difficult and heartbreaking and probably not necessary in most cases. But you can definitely separate physically from most people for 2 months. We are in this, some of us will die, not much more than usual statistically.
We can have data from past countries who has dealt with it ahead of us. Statistics help us learn lessons from it. And not reproduce the failures.
China is 30 times the size of Italy in superficie and counts 23 times more habitants. The population density is however the highest in South Korea, with 507 people per square kilometers, more than twice Italy’s population density, and 3.4 times more dense than China.
If we cannot compare the scale of Italy to the one of China, we can compare it to South Korea.
We know statistically that Italy has so far- not having reached the peak of the virus outbreak yet- 8.8 out of 10,000 * people infected. China has, at the end of their first peak or outbreak, 5.7 out of 10,000 people infected. And South Korea only 1.7 out of 10,000.
We have to take population density as a logical factor, however South Korea shows us that the answer may lay elsewhere. China had the strictest lockdown rules, but South Korea has a lower infection rate per habitants. Both China and South Korea made it mandatory to wear a face mask, and because they are already widely accepted in asian culture, everyone wore one. Italy didn’t. The lockdown rules were also way less drastic than those of China.
So we should try to reproduce as much as possible how South Korea dealt with the crisis, as it is feasible. And learn the hard lessons from Italy. That in a western democracy, restricting people’s liberties, no matter the reasons, isn’t easy to implement. Bureaucratically and we also aren’t used to this.
We are good at protecting ourselves. With a couple guidelines, especially if they are easily followed. The problem is the resulting state of the world. But as individuals, as humanity we most absolutely will survive this. Almost all of us will.
* Data on 03/22/2020 : confirmed cases in Italy 53000; China 80000; South Korea: 8900. Update 03/28/2020 : Italy now counts 92472 confirmed cases with 15.4 per 10,000 people infected. – Source
