April 24, 2020 / Ethan Siegel, Senior Contributor
Over the past few months, people all over the world have come to realize just how serious and deadly the current COVID-19 pandemic actually is. The number of confirmed global cases now exceeds 2.7 million, with a significant percentage of those leading to serious (or worse) complications. At the time this article was written, the number of COVID-19-related fatalities is approaching 200,000, with more than a quarter of those occurring in the United States alone.
And yet, there’s cause for both hope and concern. Social distancing appears to be working: the infection rate appears to be falling as we flatten the curve. The number of new infections and the number of new deaths per day appear to be reaching their peak. But now is the most critical time to keep social contact low. While many clamor to “reopen America,” a team of network epidemiologists are actively warning against close physical contact with even one person outside your household. Here’s the science behind why. 
Whenever you have an infected and contagious population, the ideal situation would be to isolate everyone who’s infected from everyone who’s not infected. If we could successfully do that, then everyone who’s currently uninfected would remain so, and everyone who’s infected would be unable to transmit the disease to others. In other words, if we successfully quarantined every person, individually, this disease would be unable to spread.