Why social distancing matters now more than ever

There is a lot of debate in this country about when the proper time to relax social distancing and work to re-open. Everyone agrees we have to re-open at some point but the discussions around when and how are filled with misinformation. An epidemiologist I know who has obviously been getting a lot of questions pulled this together to help simplify what the models are showing (he's a maryland fan, hence the turgeon reference). The tl;dr version is that social distancing is working but we need it for another few weeks to get to the optimal outcome from both a public health and economic perspective. I hope people find this informative as they think through the issue.

****

Friends, we are beating COVID-19. We have the lead. We have the momentum. We can't let up. We're not a Turge team in the B1G Tournament. We can finish out this game.

Aggressive social distancing is just as important now as it has ever been. It is in our public health AND economic interest to do so. I have attached the following scientific figures* to show where we are, and where we might be headed.

*MS Paint drawings, inspired by real-life epidemiological models.

Figure 1 shows where we are. This is the "flattening the curve" graph we all became familiar with in mid-March. We have just started the downslope. Congrats y'all, the curve is flattened. The red line is dead.

...

Figure 2 shows our immediate options, projecting out until roughly early fall.
1. We can fully re-open (gold line). This would kill just as many people as if we had never done anything at all, only a little faster this time around.
2. We can partially re-open (blue line). We can go to the barber and have restaurants and churches that are 25% full, and we can keep the number of cases just below national capacity as long as we can.
3. We can keep doing what we're doing now (green line), with aggressive distancing.
...
Note that that the difference between #2 and #3 is tens of thousands of American lives. And a lot of those restaurants that barely turned a profit before went out of business when they had to go to 25% capacity.

Figure 3 shows the potential second wave in the fall and winter. Sorry, a vaccine probably won't swoop in and save us in time for college football season. Let's check in on our 3 options.
1. In the second half of 2020, we've killed people at roughly the same rate as the extermination phase of the Holocaust. Your barber was open up until the day before he died. (gold line)
2. Everyone's out of business because they couldn't operate at full capacity, AND several hundred thousand people are dead. (blue line)
3. We won the race. We implemented containment before the second wave hit. There are still some restrictions on large gatherings, but by and large, the economy is open, and we had a total of 100k-125k deaths in 2020. Prevalence has fallen to a level where we can do testing and tracing, and we contain local pockets of infection. (green line)

...

The choice is pretty obvious to me. The option that is best for public health is also the one that is best for the economy. We have to bite the bullet for the next little while. We have to continue to socially distance as aggressively as ever, y'all.

...

We can beat this thing. If you'd like to get deep in the weeds of some pretty advanced epidemiology, Figure 4 shows how aggressive social distancing at this stage can manipulate the coronavirus' transmission dynamics in such a way that we save both a whole bunch of lives and a whole bunch of jobs.