You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit; if one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk.
Seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed.
If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbour, your neighbour is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with.
This sounds silly, it’s not.
This is not a joke or a hypothetical.
We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again and no one listens.
Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.
In contrast to hand-washing and other personal measures, social distancing measures are not about individuals, they are about societies working in unison.
These measures also take a long time to see the results.
It is hard (even for me) to conceptualize how ‘one quick little get together’ can undermine the entire framework of a public health intervention, but it does.
I promise you it does.
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Our first two events of the year have been cancelled because of Covid-19. Clean Toronto Together scheduled for April 25 and Jane’s Walk scheduled for May 2 will not take place this year.
Take care everyone.
