Monday, April 27, 2020

NY Times: "The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing"

From the New York Times we find this long read but good background information on where 'social distancing' came from.
"Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piƱata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.
When they presented their plan not long after, it was met with skepticism and a degree of ridicule by senior officials, who like others in the United States had grown accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry, with its ever-growing array of new treatments, to confront evolving health challenges.
Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing instead that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.
How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html

Shared earlier in this pandemic period but a great visual on how social distancing works.  YouTube Link = https://youtu.be/o4PnSYAqQHU




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