Social Distancing Is Not Enough
We will need a comprehensive strategy to reduce the sort of interactions that can lead to more infections
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By Derek Thompson
COVID-19 has mounted a sustained attack on public life, especially indoor life. Many of the largest super-spreader events took place inside — at a church in South Korea, an auditorium in France, a conference in Massachusetts. The danger of the indoors is more than anecdotal. A Hong Kong paper awaiting peer review found that of 7,324 documented cases in China, only one outbreak occurred outside — during a conversation among several men in a small village. The risk of infection indoors is almost 19 times higher than in open-air environments, according to another study from researchers in Japan.
Appropriately, just about every public indoor space in America has been shut down or, in the case of essential businesses such as grocers, adapted for social-distancing restrictions. These closures have been economically ruinous, transforming large swaths of urban and suburban life into a morbid line of darkened windows.
Today, states are emerging from the lockdown phase of the crisis and entering a queasy period of reopening. But offices, schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bars, gyms, fitness centers, and museums will have no semblance of normalcy until we learn how to be safe — and feel safe — inside.
To open these spaces, we must be guided by science and expertise. Fortunately for us, researchers are discovering the secrets of how COVID-19 spreads with a combination of clever modeling and detective work.
Before we review the relevant studies and draw out lessons for the future of the great indoors, a brief word of humility. Our understanding of this disease is dynamic. Today’s conventional wisdom could be tomorrow’s busted myth. Think of these studies not as gospels, but as clues in a gradually unraveling mystery.
1. COVID-PROOF THE OFFICE
On March 8, South Korean public-health officials learned of a COVID-19–positive patient working in a call center in downtown Seoul. The office was located in one of the densest parts of the city, on the 11th floor of a 19-story mixed-use building with…
