That desire you have to get together with just one friend, and break the social distancing barrier which has kept us all apart during the coronavirus outbreak, may seem like a simple and harmless act. But a new website set up by University of Washington researchers illustrates how little it would take to undo the benefits of keeping our distance.
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The site, called “Can’t I please just visit one friend,” sounds like a whiny and completely understandable refrain for those of us who have heard it coming from kids (and plenty of adults) for the past few weeks.
Steven Goodreau, a UW professor of anthropology, and Martina Morris, a UW professor emerita of sociology and statistics, are both network epidemiologists, and their team is studying how social connections influence the spread of infectious agents, according to a story in UW News.
You don’t have to run into the home of someone you haven’t seen in a month and give them a big kiss or hug in order to be in danger. Simply being in the same room, inside the 6-foot spacing we’ve all been warned about, to potentially spread the virus.
Three illustrations on the site (above) manage to visualize the effectiveness of social distancing measures on a hypothetical community of 200 households. In each model, the social connections in this community are adjusted.
Each green dot is a household. The gray lines running between households are social connections — specifically the types that could spread the COVID-19 virus, such as close contact among people. In the no-social-distancing model, each household has, on average, 15 connections to other households.
After social distancing, most households are isolated, but 10 percent of households, shown as blue dots, include a person with an essential job, such as health care worker or grocery clerk, etc. The largest cluster created by these connections, to potentially spread COVID-19, encompasses just 26 percent of households.
In the visiting “just one friend” scenario, the community is quickly reconnected. Most households — 71 percent — are now reconnected in one large cluster, the site says, and a single COVID-19 case in one of these households now has the direct or indirect social connections needed to spread to nearly three-quarters of the families in this community.
“There have been lots of discussions and articles about using social distancing to do things like ‘flatten the curve,’” Goodreau said. “We wanted to illustrate these principles at a community level, to help people visualize how even seemingly simple connections aren’t so simple.”
Under “lessons learned,” the researchers acknowledge that humans are social animals, and reducing connectivity in social networks is hard, but waiting to hang out with friends again is worth it. “Every additional connection that we can postpone until COVID-19 is under control has the potential to save one or more lives,” they write.
