The COVID-19 pandemic

[tomh009]

The spread of COVID is really controlled by three key factors:

Contact: the contact between an infected person and others. The more contacts there are, the faster it will spread. This is what a lockout aims to eliminate (and what restrictions on mass events etc do to a lesser extent).

Exposure: the ease with which viruses can spread during the contact. Social distancing, shields and facemasks all reduce the exposure levels, extended contact increases it.

Duration: the length of time that an infected person is making contact with others. This can be reduced through increased testing (identifying infected persons) and trough contact tracing (identifying both source of infection and others potentially infected).

The point is that lockout is one way to address this. If people behave well to rigorously minimize exposure, that will have a big impact, too. And if we can reduce the duration that infected people are "out in the wild", combined with exposure reduction, that combination may well be sufficient to eliminate the the need for a full lockout.

Unfortunately, we are not doing as well as we should be on the exposure and duration fronts at the moment.