'Social distancing' in a pandemic: What does it really look like and what is the cost of draconian r

A Japanese panel of experts on anti-coronavirus measures said March 9 that mass infections tend to occur in crowded, poorly ventilated spaces, where people have conversations in close range of one another. The experts urged the public to steer clear of such situations.

Lisa Sedger, who heads the Viruses and Cytokine Biology research group at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, told The Japan Times that social distancing is “the best way to reduce infection rates in the current situation when we do not yet have proven anti-viral drugs or a vaccine.”

She said there have been examples of self-isolation and social distancing working in Asia, including in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began. She said the number of daily cases there had started to decline “after 14 days or so of harsh quarantine.”

Sedger contended that the benefits of social distancing outweigh the economic sacrifices in the long term, considering that it can save lives while reducing the costs to the health care system and the impact on business productivity because of “people being away from work due to illness.”

But what is the appropriate escalation and timing of social-distancing measures?

To get it right, Japan and other countries need to carefully calibrate their responses based on their monitoring of the outbreak, since the restrictions do have a “massive societal and economic cost,” according to professor Eyal Leshem, director of the Institute for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

“It is critical,” Leshem said, “to collect and model these surveillance data in a conservative way and escalate social-distancing recommendations before the medical system is overwhelmed with critical patients.”