Staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Day 0
- Anticipation before the illness begins
- Early detection during disease emergence
- Containment at the early stages of transmission (i.e., local spread)
- Impact mitigation when the number of cases grow exponentially
- Elimination and/or eradication
Obviously, because COVID-19 is now declared a pandemic, efforts are focused on containment (e.g., keeping cases within borders or keeping more imported cases from entering a region) and mitigation (e.g., how to soften the blow to political, social, and economic systems).
In the San Francisco Bay Area, six counties have decided to require residents to "shelter-in-place" from March 17 to April 7; we should stay home (social distancing) and observe proper hygiene as much as possible. This means that our time outside the house are limited to the conduct of essential activities. It's just a matter of time to see if this approach (which will surely irritate and frustrate a lot of people) is effective in slowing down the disease transmission. Note that there are over 300 cases in the Bay Area before the isolation period starts.
The public health announcement about "shelter-in-place", issued the day before it's implemented.
Good thing is that there are a lot of shows to choose from on Netflix and on Amazon Prime, I've got a project deliverable to finish before I give birth, and my computer is hooked up to WiFi. Boredom potentially managed. Let's see how three weeks stuck at home will work out (there's no barre class during the shelter-in-place period).
As an aside, during the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic (2002–2004), I was placed in home isolation for about a week because I was potentially exposed to someone who just came from an affected country (we were in the same flight to a conference). I had a pretty good idea about the boring experience of staying indoors at length... before the time of WiFi, laptops, and smart cellphones... and no tv in my room (because my family only has one tv set at home and it's in the living room). So when it was Val's turn to go into social distancing mode in February (because he flew out of Rome just a week before COVID-19's geographic spread reached the city), I was able to support him through it, somewhat, albeit long-distance (he's in Los Baños). He was also able to finish a lot of work while he was at home.