#Let's Stop Talking About Social Distancing - RSS (BUTTON) (BUTTON) (BUTTON) Explore -- + Science + ServiceNow BrandVoice | Paid Program + Social Media + Tableau BrandVoice | Paid Program + T-Mobile For Business BrandVoice | Paid Program -- Coronavirus|Oct 26, 2020,04:50pm EDT| Let's Stop Talking About Social Distancing John Drake -- * Share to Linkedin Physical distancing Physical distancing is important for preventing the spread of Covid-19 getty Although the practice of quarantine is ancient, the term “social distancing” is actually quite recent. The problem with “social distancing” is that it points to the wrong thing: It’s not social connections that spread Covid-19, flu or any other infectious disease, but physical contact. And, right now, as Covid-fatigue sets in and the mental health costs of the Covid-19 pandemic are skyrocketing, what we need to be emphasizing is physical distance and social connectedness. When and why did we start talking about social distancing as a means to control infectious diseases? (The phrase has actually long been used with a completely different meaning, i.e. shunning by individuals for social control.) It’s quite possible that epidemiologists have used the term -- the first SARS pandemic (2003), and even more with respect to the subsequent concern over the possibility of influenza pandemics. Use of the exact term “social distancing” is rare in reports from 2003, but gained currency over the next couple of years. -- Given the lack of both antivirals and vaccines, our forebears struggled with the global outbreaks of the past with a mixture of masks, quarantine, and social distancing. [In the same essay, Oxford also wrote: “There is no evidence that this -- Around the same time, CDC scientist Marty Cetron and Yale University bioethicist and pediatrician Julius Landwirth wrote about social distancing in an essay entitled Public health and ethical considerations in planning for quarantine that was published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. Interestingly, even though Cetron and Landwirth provided a series of relevant definitions, they did not define “social distancing”. The closest concepts they define are words and phrases like “isolation” -- of SARS in 2003. Even though Cetron and Landwirth did not define “social distancing” (or “social distance”), they used the phrase a total of five times in their writing. For instance, they wrote that: Modern public health places quarantine within a broader spectrum of interventions generally referred to as “social distancing.” An editorial by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times from a year -- If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is "social distancing," which is the new politically correct way of saying "quarantine." From there, references to social distancing become quite commonplace. A 2006 article in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases is entitled “Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza”. World Health Organization recommendations concerning pandemic flu appearing in the same journal earlier in that year included the -- relevance to Covid-19: If the pandemic is severe, social distancing measures such as school closures should be considered. Nonessential domestic travel to affected areas should be deferred. Hand and respiratory hygiene should be -- rights. These are not all of the examples. Indeed, from 2006 “social distancing” has become standard language in the technical literature about infectious diseases and their control, just as in 2020 this phrase began to enjoy widespread usage in ordinary language. But, the problem remains that it is wrong. It is not social distancing that we should desire, but physical distancing with social connection. Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus