March 17th, 2020 by Sarah Miles

At this point, nobody could have avoided hearing about the threat of coronavirus and the measures that we must now implement to minimise the spread of the disease. Because we have moved beyond the ‘containment’ stage into a ‘delay’ phase, the objective is to slow down the spread of the disease, primarily to prevent our health service becoming overwhelmed. The main strategy to achieve this that we have been advised to take is social distancing. Social distancing is a public health strategy that slows down the spread of infectious diseases by keeping people physically separate from each other.

Why is social distancing important?

COVID-19 has been likened to a nasty flu, but this isn’t the full story. The exact symptoms can vary from person-to-person, so some people will require hospital treatment, others might be laid up in bed with flu-like symptoms, and many may not display any obvious symptoms at all.

Healthy people can generally fight the infection well on their own and are unlikely to experience any severe complications. If you fall into this category you may well believe that social distancing is an overreaction and not necessary for you. This couldn’t be further from the truth, however; this is exactly the reason you should take social distancing seriously.

While you may be potentially low risk, the issue here is all the people who are high risk: the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. If you go about your usual business without any attempt at social distancing you could become infected. This may not be a big problem for you, and it's highly likely you may not even realise you’re carrying the disease, but you could then go on to infect many others before you develop any symptoms. The people that you infect could be high risk themselves, or they could go on to infect high-risk people, and so on. For a better illustration of this, look at the case of “Patient 31”, a South Korean woman who infected over 1,000 people in the southern city of Daegu.

Social distancing is, therefore, everyone’s responsibility.

How can you implement social distancing?

For most of us with busy lives, social distancing is quite difficult and it’s not practical for everyone to batten down the hatches and hide away from all human contact for 2 weeks. There are, however, many ways that you can put social distancing measures in place to vastly minimise contact with people, and therefore, the virus. If you reduce contact by half, you are reducing the spread of the virus by half.

Here are some sensible approaches to implementing social distancing:

Avoid public gatherings and events

While you may have been looking forward to that concert, show, or party, consider the bigger picture. You may be in business and attend regular networking events or conferences and are worried about how missing them might impact on sales. At this moment in time, public health has to trump any events with high numbers of people. Most are being cancelled anyway by responsible organisers but if they do go ahead, give your apologies and stay home. Most will be rearranged when things get back to normal.

Avoid touching high contact items in public

When you are out, be careful about what you touch. Coins, touch screens, pens, bar snacks, shopping trolleys, door handles etc. Items like these are touched by hundreds of people every day. Where you can avoid them, do. Pay by contactless card, use your own pen, order at a drive-through or online, push through doors with your shoulder if you can, wipe surfaces down before you use them and always wash your hands after touching anything. Also, try not to touch your face as this is one way you can become infected.

Find remote ways of working

Obviously, it is not practical for everyone to work from home but if you can, you should. Smart systems are designed to allow people to work remotely such as cloud document storage, VOIP phone systems that allow calls to be transferred anywhere, video conferencing for meetings, and so on. If you are an employer, make it as easy as you can for staff to work remotely. If this isn’t practical can you extend the working day and create shifts so that it reduces the number of people in the office at the same time? Do whatever you can to enable people to continue to work safely.

Find alternative leisure activities

Our normal lives take us out of the house for a whole manner of things other than work: socialising, shopping, exercise etc. Our approach to these activities also needs to get more creative. Use Skype and Facetime to socialise with friends, order your shopping online, order takeaways instead of going to restaurants, do home fitness videos from YouTube rather than go to the gym, and so on.

Keep a safe distance and avoid physical contact

When it is necessary to go out, try and keep a sensible distance. The advice is to keep at least 2 metres away from people. Physical contact is, therefore, not recommended, even with close friends and family. Hugging, kissing, shaking hands etc should be avoided.

Avoid going out at peak times

If you do have to go out, make a sensible assessment of which times are likely to be busiest. Avoid public transport at rush hour and the supermarket on a Saturday. Don’t go to the pub on a Friday evening and avoid walking around at school run times. Keep all outings to a minimum and only when strictly necessary. If you still have to go to work, see whether your employer would consider flexible hours so that everyone isn’t travelling in and home during the busiest periods. It may be that the government will restrict us to essential travel by law before long; at time of writing, this hasn’t happened, however.

We all have to work together

Nobody ever said that social distancing would be fun. It is, without a doubt, going to adversely affect everyone. Unfortunately, the alternative is much more serious than some short term inconveniences and social distancing will only work if there is mass take-up. This is why we all have a responsibility to consider the most vulnerable people and pull together at a time of global crisis.