NEWS YOU CAN USE: Social Distancing: Hold the Line. ‘This virus is unforgiving to unwise choices.’ “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 neighbor, your neighbor 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 hypothetical. We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again. Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.”

I’ll just add that I see people acting as if this is graded on a curve: “At least I’m doing better than X.” The disease doesn’t care if you’re doing better, and you don’t get extra credit for trying. You either avoid it or you don’t.