NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW)- When the Coronavirus was first diagnosed, the government responded by initiating a “containment mode,” by trying to find every case, all contacts, quarantining those affected and trying to prevent it from entering the United States.
“Since then, we’ve learned there’s substantial community spread and it’s moved beyond containment,” explained Dr. William Schaffner, Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy as well as Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
“We moved to a new phase called mitigation. We are dampening it down, diminishing the impact,” Schaffner said. “Now we know it’s spreading and we can’t stop it but we can diminish the impact.”
Social Distancing
Since the virus is spread through person-to-person contact in close proximity, limiting contact of people is the next step.
“If I have the virus and breath out, some of what I exhaled has the virus in it. If you are standing three feet within me you will inhale it,” Schaffner said. ” You will then have the virus and you will get sick. How can we interrupt the spread of the virus? The way to do that is to increase the distance between us if we do that, the virus can’t get from me to you.”
Schaffner said this step is called: social distancing.
“There are a lot of occasions where we do have close face-to-face contact with each other. We are trying to eliminate those occasions,” Schaffner said.
Professionally, many are holding virtual meetings, allowing working from home and reducing business travel for their employees.
Several education institutions, churches and religious places of worship, and entertainment venues and shows have cancelled or postponed activities.
“We are trying to dampen down the epidemic and infect as few of us as possible,” Schaffner said. “That’s what happens when you go from containment to mitigation.”
New Virus
How long this mitigation stage could last is unknown, as the COVID-19 virus is new and being researched and studied.
“Several things could happen. This could be a virus like influenza. It could be seasonal,” Schaffner said. “It’s a new virus and we don’t know what it will do. It could infect so many people and make everyone immune and there’s no place for it to go so the epidemic dies out that way, those are the two main ways. … We need to keep supporting research for a coronavirus vaccine. It will very important.”
The virus can land on contaminated surfaces and good hand hygiene is important.
Right now, social distancing is the answer to stop the spread.