Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

[Dude111]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

DC is closing schools through the end of the month. I suspect my parents' babysitting duties are about to explode.

Ya I have been hearing this... WHY UNTIL ONLY THE END OF THE MONTH things are closing??

Is it gonna magically dissapear??


My mom/dad cancelled thier trip to florida and disneyworld is closing for 2 weeks also. (Until the end of march)

Originally Posted by Flint

I do NOT want to make this into a political thread.

Ya its best not to. This isnt the political base after all.....

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Dude111

Ya I have been hearing this... WHY UNTIL ONLY THE END OF THE MONTH things are closing??

Is it gonna magically dissapear??

It's to flatten out the rate of community spread, so there are enough hospital beds to deal with the critical cases that are inevitably going to happen as a result of the known infections and the fact that we've passed the point of being able to do contact tracing.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Dude111

Ya I have been hearing this... WHY UNTIL ONLY THE END OF THE MONTH things are closing??

Is it gonna magically dissapear??


My mom/dad cancelled thier trip to florida and disneyworld is closing for 2 weeks also. (Until the end of march)

Ya its best not to. This isnt the political base after all.....

Hi Dude

ƒlint's explanation is exactly correct. I can not improve on it.

What I might be able to do is to describe a picture that might help you visualize what's going on and why a two-week school closure might help.

I want you to imagine a fire in the forest. A few trees have caught fire from a campfire--bad. As the fire gets hotter on each tree, the unburned trees adjacent to the burning trees might catch on fire--probably will catch on fire, at some point. With no intervention, the edge of the fire just grows bigger and bigger, the whole fire gets hotter and faster because there's more of it and it wants to spread to unburned areas.

Now imagine at the very start of the fire if we had been able to cut a firebreak around the burning trees and just let them burn. Since the heat from the fire wasn't close enough to spread to the other trees across the firebreak, the fire will die out. That would be great. That WOULD HAVE BEEN great if we'd closed our borders (put a firebreak around the country--exceedingly difficult) before any cases/fire showed up in the country. That did not happen.

But! Imagine if we had teams of foresters moving just beyond the edge of the fire, not cutting a complete break, but cutting down every other tree, or every third or eighth tree. Now the unburned trees in close proximity to the burning trees are fewer--there are fewer places for the fire to leap onto and spread outward. This won't put the fire out but it chokes the speed of the spread, giving the firefighters and foresters time to do their job. Their opponent, the fire, is growing more slowly giving them time to focus on the hottest spots or the most vulnerable spots.

Now back to the schools and concerts and basketball games, etc. By limiting the close physical contact or near contact of lots of people, like the kids, or the fans, there are literally fewer opportunities for the virus to be spread. So as ƒlint pointed out, the curve, the steepness with which the number of new cases/burning trees increases will be less steep, the curve will be flattened. This flattening gives us/firefighters/hospitals/first responders/test kit manufacturers more time working at maximum capacity to address the ones that are sick/ablaze. Those resources are limited. Keeping the number of people they have to address under the number they can address is all we can do now. The alternative is to just get burned.