Covid-19 and avoiding the "three C's"

Here's a link to the most interesting piece about COVID-19 that I've come across this morning --- a guest essay headlined "What Japan Got Right About Covid-19" published in this morning's New York Times. The author is Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of virology at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan and advisor to the Japanese government on its Covid-19 response.

One way of gauging success in the struggle against the virus involves the numbers of cases and deaths. Japan has had about 146 deaths per million people in the pandemic so far. The United States has had about 2,590 deaths per million.

The first step was affirmation of an hypothesis that aerosols — tiny infectious particles or droplets suspended in the air — were playing the major role in coronavirus spread.

Out of that grew a strategy based upon the concept that people should avoid so far as possible the three C’s --- closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings. The fact that public masking has long been an accepted practice in Japan contributed to the strategy's success.

Anyhow, the piece is worth a read. And keeping the "three C's" in mind remains a sensible thing to do.